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December 2007 - Strategy Magazine
Media

Pay-out and payoff
Adventures in Web 2.0 - Vol. 1

by Jesse Kohl
page 29

If social media and Web 2.0 tools can turn a nobody into a household name, what can they do for your brand? Some marketers are grappling with that question, while others are jumping in and "joining the conversation." Strategy explores the ins and outs of making friends online in part one of a two-part series.

It's all good if you have sticky content, such as music or video assets, to reel in fans, but can marketers from any category succeed in the social media space? Will consumers befriend a product just because it has Web 2.0 presence? And which is better: a thousand views on YouTube, or one brand advocate joining your community?

To get some answers, and to explore the social potential of diverse categories, we checked in on what Canadian banks and book publishers are doing with social media. Why banks and books? They represent two ends of the marketing spectrum: one has marketing dough but not a lot of story; the other has content to share, but far less wherewithal to get the word out. Also, both categories have been playing around in this space for some time now, and their strategies are evolving based on what they've learned.

This month, we look at the banks. Next month, we'll report on the book publishers.

RBC dangles dollar bills to trigger online R&D

RBC Royal Bank of Canada has embraced social media as a means of moving into a new era of collaboration with consumers. Last year, the bank entered the online space in a big way with the Next Great Innovator competition, developed with Toronto's Delvinia Interactive, which reached out to the very well-networked and well-connected student segment. This pilot launch in the fall of 2006 sowed the seeds for RBC's current Web 2.0 strategy.

University and college students were asked to describe an innovative idea that financial institutions should consider implementing. Working in teams, students submitted proposals, hoping to win a chunk of the $45,000 prize pot. RBC marketed the competition at 18 schools, using posters, campus newspaper ads, recruiting sessions, interaction with clubs, word of mouth and its fall campus flyer. Submissions arrived from 45 institutions (a total of 269 teams of three to four students each). And within a window of about six months (September through to the awards in February), NextGreatInnovator.com recorded 43,175 unique user sessions, 176,000 page views and 8,913 views of the first public-facing blog by a financial institution.

"That speaks to the viral nature of the way communication spreads and the way initiatives take off with this demographic - which is part and parcel of the social networking phenomenon," says RBC's head of innovation and process design, Dr. Anita Sands. "Given that our target was to have 50 teams register, and that we only marketed at 18 institutions in the pilot year, we view this as an inordinate success."

This year, RBC upped the number of schools targeted to 24. The bank is repeating last year's tactics, but it kicked off the contest with an earlier awareness phase in August, establishing contact with professors, clubs and administrators. In 2006, only one professor embedded the challenge into the curriculum. This year, seven professors at five schools have done so.

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