mobile brands social activation in terms of marketing activites

1. Superficial Social Metrics: The Social Marketing Trap
Brands have fallen into the social marketing trap at one point or another. Pouring energy into
growing a social presence and posting the polls, pictures, and videos to entice fans into ‘Liking’
and retweeting their posts in sites i.e Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Linkedin etc. Then,
when they have reached their desired social following size, the rest of the team asks the
inevitable questions – how do these numbers help the company? How does a large social
presence drive the bottom line? What was our ROI on this campaign? This is where most social
media marketers flounder.
Social marketers are starting to look beyond the ‘Likes’ they relied on in 2013-201
On the plus side, brands have the confidence of influential analysts firms, including Gartner, who
predicts that 50% of all web sales will come via social and mobile by 2015. They also have
recent studies finding benefits like a 24% increase in overall sales among companies who include
Facebook in their media planning. The question, then, is how do they achieve and measure value
in social? The answer is not by measuring ‘Likes’ or last-click attribution, but rather social
activation and careful measurement of each activation step.
Proven Social ROI via Social Activation
By placing an engaging social experience at the core of its business, Google (Android)
receives 25% of its total website traffic from social, and attributes up to a third of its sales to
social media. Moreover, 50% of new Android customers now come from social, and socially
activated customers have doubled the lifetime value.
As a second example,Samsung claims that Facebook-connected users are twice as engaged on
their official website.
Social Activation Explained
What led to success for Google (Android) and Samsung was not a simple last-click attribution,
which is often seen as the standard for online revenue generation, but rather a holistic view of

2. social value that includes brand awareness, user engagement, and a multiple touch-point
approach to tie social’s effect into moving overall sales.
Social activation plays a central role because social media, and Facebook in particular, attracts
brand fans interested in engaging with valuable brand content. Either individual to individual, or
company to individual, social success can only occur with engaging, valuable content that draws
a user to interact with that content.
In fact, the two biggest mistakes digital marketers make when it comes to measuring social are
relying primarily on the “new” social metrics like ‘Likes’ and follows, or the “old” search
advertising metric of last-click attribution – a collaborative Facebook/Datalogix study found that
campaigns focused on maximizing reach saw a 70% higher ROI than those focused on clicks.
But to truly succeed in social media, challenge is to go beyond reach, clicks, and ‘Likes’ as
goals, and instead focus on achieving and measuring the social activation of your customers,
which includes everything from Discovery, to Interactions, to Transactions, to Endorsements.
Using DITE, you can improve all aspects of marketing, and ultimately, sales, while measuring
each step.

3. SONY STORY
Campaign Summary
Sony Mobile is the 10th most socially engaged brand in India, according to a Nielsen McKinsey
survey. This is due to the performance of the Sony Mobile India Facebook page, which gained
800,000 fans in eight months with consistently increasing engagement levels. Sony achieved this
through a series of campaigns, tightly integrated with Sony’s smartphone launch calendar. The
audience was carefully selected and targeted through contests appealing to specific groups.
Sony’s campaigns included crowdsourced phone reviews, theme-based photographs, dance
choreography and quizzes. Designed to be viral, each contest brought a large number of viewers
and fans to the page.
Sony Mobile India now has 1.3 million fans, second only to Samsung Mobile India.
Research and Insights
Desktop research and social media analysis, including listening to and monitoring communities
and conversations, gave the insights required to design our strategy. They found perceptions of
Sony as a youthful brand with music and sound quality being the unique selling points of its
smartphones amongst the target audience. It also revealed peer-to-peer recommendations as one
of the prime drivers of smartphone purchase decisions.
They also identified 13- to 25-year-olds as the key target for Sony smartphones based on our
analysis and started building SONY’s campaign on channels frequented by this audience. The
platforms we chose for Sony Mobile were Facebook and YouTube. The research also showed
sound quality and looks as the attributes most appealing to the target group.
Strategy
Drawing on our research, SONY crafted a strategy that reflected ‘vibrancy and youth’ and
focused on engaging audiences through an integrated programme that straddled social media, TV
commercials and product launches.
The campaign was focused on showcasing specific phone attributes – sound quality, waterproof,
camera quality and stylish looks .SONY used a series of contests, quizzes and crowdsourced
content to generate widespread awareness and engagement on social platforms. SONY
collaborated with Shiamak Davar, India’s best-known choreographer and youth icon, for a dance
contest and are now extending the association to a college-level ground activation and many
other events like Audi Photography. .
HOW DO SONY DO IT ?
SONY had the capabilities to seamlessly execute campaigns in tandem with new product launches on
multiple social platforms. Our intelligence tools measured up Sony’s competitors and we planted the roots
for a 360 degree Social Customer Relationship Management and a capability for social commerce
SONY first created a Facebook app that asked users for written and video reviews of Sony Mobile
smartphones. This showcased the recommendations of technology enthusiasts so that actionable changes
to the product marketing and design teams, straight from the fans, could be made.

4. Second campaign, was for Sony Mobile’s Arclight smartphone, which embodies superior design, feel
and look. SONY launched a Sony Mobile Arclight ‘LookBook’ competition for Facebook fans and asked
them to send stylish images of themselves to feature in an official album to be launched on Facebook.
Third campaign, for the Live With Walkman smartphone, ideal for music lovers, began with featuring an
upcoming TV commercial featuring a celebrity. The TVC featured the facebook page, making it a truly
cross-media promotion. It resulted in a second competition – one of the largest online dance video
contests, ‘Go Thump! Live With Walkman’. Users were asked to upload videos of dances to be judged by
Shiamak. Contestants were asked to dance to the music of the commercial for their video, and an app on
Facebook populated a specially-created YouTube channel for Sony Ericsson in India.
For the flagship Sony Mobile Xperia S launch, sony livestreamed all three launch events on Facebook,
bringing hundreds more to the launch virtually.
The next campaign, ‘Get Shorty’, is currently running for the Xperia U smartphone, which allows users to
change the colour and appearance of the lower portion of the phone. This campaign asks users to upload
photos showcasing their true colours, following which an app analyses the pictures to give the person’s
true colour. SONY alos coupled this campaign with a Spiderman Trivia quiz, timed to coincide with the
release of ‘Spiderman-3’, and gave away Xperia U smartphones to winners along with Spiderman
merchandise.
Some Highlights from the campaign include -
• Xperia S sales targets were met within three days.
• The number of fans for Sony Mobile India quadrupled from over 500,000 to over 2 million
within twelve months of managing the Facebook page.
• Sony Mobile was recognised as the 10th most popular brand on social media in India by NM
Incite, a joint venture by Nielsen and McKinsey & Co.
• We delivered 95 million+ impressions and reached 35 million users within the first eight months
of managing the Facebook page.
• We engaged 600,000 non-fans, and added 2,000+ fans every day with over 10,000 stories created
around posts each day.
• The viral effect of more than 1,000 dance videos brought more than 1,300 people every day to
the Sony Mobile India Facebook page and subscribers to the associated YouTube channel.
 The Spiderman quiz had 5,000 registrations and more than 26,000 answers in the four
days it was open.

5. APPLE
Campaign Brief: Challenges and Objectives
The Indian smartphone market is crowded and competitive; Apple Iphone competes with
Samsung, HTC and Sony. Apple’s brief was simple: raise awareness of their products through
their outstanding design and up-to-date technology in terms of quality parameters i.e
performance and realiability and apple concentrated on brand as a whole making it an added
advantage for their products , be it iphone, ipad etc. And this is what that gives competitive edge
to apple apart from their diffenent operating system.
Apple’s objective evolved to become tactical in supporting brand activation through emphasising
on their environmental & social responsibility.
Apple changed the previous notion of “I’ll take what you give”, the mindset is changing to “give
me what I need”. Apple has very well harnessed the power of social media through their active
media as well as social participation especially at time of product launch and realized their
responsibility towards environment.
After Apple unveils the iPhone 6 today, you’ll hear about it just about everywhere — on TV, on
news websites, and relentlessly on Twitter and Facebook. Just about the only places you won’t
hear about it are on Apple’s official corporate social media channels, because they basically
don’t exist.
More than a decade after the creation of Facebook and more than eight years after the founding
of Twitter, the world’s most valuable company and second-most valuable brand is an
increasingly lonely social media holdout. Though it maintains accounts for iTunes and the App
Store, Apple doesn’t have an official corporate Facebook page or Twitter profile. Nor does it
have one on Instagram, Google+ or Pinterest. The CIA may feel like it can’t afford not to tweet,
but Apple is a little more careful with its communications.
Following several campaigns (for example, Green my Apple), Apple has made their
products greener. Recently, the new iphone 6 removed many toxins and improved the products
battery life and recharge cycles. In advance of Earth Day, Apple overhauled its Environmental
Responsibility website with new content that reconfirms the company's dedication to operate its
business in a way that is best for the environment. They say, “WE WANT TO LEAVE THE
WORLD BETTER THAN WE FOUND IT”. They strive to create products that are beautiful,
easy to use, and powerful without harming the environment.
Apple is second in terms of Brand value worldwide. It’s world largest smart phone seller.
In order to keep up to its reputation and brand value apple launched the ‘Better’ Environmental
campaign along with Tim Cook on 21st April 2014. Apple wanted to create the awareness in the
society and tell them the measures taken by them and how they care for the environment as a
whole big family.

6. SIMILARITES & DIFFERENCES IN THE MARKETING ACTIVITES
Similarities
Both the campaigns focused on the target group, cut across the technology adoption spectrum – from
early adopters to laggards. The ability of both the brands to showcase specific elements of each phone
and tie them back to the core campaign plan allowed the community to identify with all the difference.
Their individual transmedia campaigns, while addressing product-specific target groups, combined to
activate, engage and grow the fan base as a seamless social media story.
Difference
 The major diff in both above discussed brands is that Apple as a brand does not support
social activities instead does its brand activation through various social, environment and
awareness messages & programs. Whereas Sony Xperia follows social activites for
brand activated through cross-media promotion.
 Apple has signed the CERES Climate Declaration and cares for the environment on the
other hand sony has not undertaken any of such activity.
 APPLE leveraged existing APPLE’s relationships, using popular products like macbooks,
ipods etc and sound accessories, as rewards while SONY’s strategy was to co-create
maximum content through fans using contests. They ensured high levels of participation
and engagement by sharing examples of what we were looking for, be it photo or video
contests.
 The other major difference is that SONY communicate to people about its products and
their feature like camera quality , sound quality etc while APPLE uses its brand value to
reach the customers

7. Suggesion for the brands
Although there are many things both Sony and apple can do but here 5 Best Practices for
Social Media Activation at Big Events i.e launch shows etc.
 Create a short, easy event hashtag. Be fun, relevant and clever when coming up with the
hashtag. (Example: #MLKDay2013)
 Showcase @handles and #hashtags prominently throughout the event on all printed materials,
signage, screens, etc. This will make it easy for people to talk about your event on social
media.
 Create stations such as “photo moments” booths where the messaging, handles and hashtags
are pre-programmed so that all guests need to do is take their photo and it will automatically
be titled (so they don’t need to worry about typing it all in correctly, mis-spelling sponsor
names, etc.) Again, you want the social integration to be easy for guests and flow seamlessly
throughout the event.
 Create multiple, fun, branded ways for guests to amplify socially within the event. For
example, create easy opportunities for attendees to share when checking in or voting and give
them the opportunity to create custom photos, insta-prints, etc.
 Have dedicated “brand ambassadors” responsible for event host/brand instagramming,
pinning, posting and tweeting. Make sure to train and prep your team about how to handle
and respond to @replies and mentions. With social, interaction is critical. It’s not enough just
to get followers–you want to encourage authentic connection.
CONCLUSION
This document is an analysis to understand where APPLE stands compared to
SONY and identify the trends between the two brands in terms of social marketing activation.
The product categories which we are looking at are smart-phones. Among the many players in
the market, SONY is known for its high-end innovations and designs, which seem to have
inspired APPLE in many ways during its early days. But in the present context, it is facing a
huge challenge to keep up with innovations and market trends. In terms of Benchmarking,
APPLE is way above SONY and SONY is closely associated with NOKIA. The recent rise of
Google android (operating system) has given APPLE a tough time, simply beats every corner of
the market.