As I embark on yet another Fat Tuesday, I can’t help but flashback almost two decades (yes, it’s hard to believe, but it’s been 17 years since I first invited you to experience the first version of My Mardi Gras Experience: Mardi Gras via my Tweetstream) and marvel at the power of Social Media to build brand perception. Back then, my little experiment was novel (no one had ever live-streamed an outdoor event like Mardi Gras, much less tried to use Twitter to alter brand perception). Yet, still so many fail to grasp the power of social media platforms to create, enhance, or change your company’s and/or your individual brand perception.
Using Social Media To Change The Mardi Gras Brand
For those of you who may not have been following me at the time, let me give you a brief background.
In 2009, I got a crazy idea. I would live-tweet (it was a relatively new thing back then) Mardi Gras and see whether people who followed me changed their opinions of it. I invited a few Twitter Influencers, my “Select Six” as I called them. Heavy hitters like @ChrisBrogan, @MackCollier, @LisaHoffmann, @Armano, @BethHarte and @AmberCadabra.
They, in turn, told all their followers about what I was doing… live tweeting Mardi Gras experience and encouraged their followers to follow @TomMartin to get in on the fun. Throughout my little campaign, they were also gracious enough to retweet many of the tweets.
What they and I didn’t tell anyone was that it was all a big research study. I invited everyone to take a quick brand linkage survey before I started tweeting. Then I started….
After the five-day tweet fest, I thanked everyone for following along and asked them to complete a brief survey to share their feedback. I didn’t tell them it was the same survey. What we found was nothing short of remarkable. In fact, it was so incredible, I did it again in 2010.
Only this time, I branded it “My Mardi Gras Experience,” launched a dedicated website, and invited mommy, travel, and influencer bloggers to join in the fun. We used Livestream’s new Livepack (described as a satellite truck in a backpack) mobile video streaming technology to livestream countless hours of parade footage across the two Mardi Gras weekends. This included putting super blogger Peter Shankman on a Rex float on Fat Tuesday and having him livestream his entire ride while he simultaneously hosted a little Tweet-in Show where folks could tweet him questions and he’d answer on the 3-hour livestream.
Yes, I know… so easy to do today… Back then, we needed the Livepack, a specialized modem that automatically hopped between 8 different 4G cellular streams, a small computer, and a backpack to house it all. But I digress.
Social Media Changes Brand Perceptions
Here’s the thing. I’m always telling you to show, not tell, if you want to change minds. And man, did these two experiments demonstrate that in spades. For both the 2009 and 2010 efforts, we conducted pre- and post-surveys to establish brand linkage.
It was a simple test: I asked a few questions, then a matching question. I asked each respondent, “When you think of Mardi Gras, what comes to mind? (click all that apply).”
Then we gave them 10 choices:
- Beads
- New Orleans
- Parades
- Floats
- Crazy
- Beer
- Flashing
- Food
- Ladders
- Family
- Tailgating
- Church
That last one, Church, was our control variable. While most folks don’t know this, Mardi Gras is actually a religiously induced holiday. As I expected, very few people linked the Church to Mardi Gras. Likewise, during the campaign, I did nothing to link the Church to Mardi Gras. Didn’t show any churches, never mentioned the religious connection, etc. Thus, if in the post-study Church didn’t show any movement in terms of brand linkage, I felt like that indicated a fairly “clean” data set.
So what happened on the way to the parade, you ask? See for yourself.
Look what happens to Crazy, Flashing, and Family! Crazy drops by 17% and Flashing drops by 37%. Conversely, Family jumped 58%, Food rose 23%, Ladders (82%), and Tailgating (122%) rounded out the major changes.
And that was the point. I was trying to reframe Mardi Gras from Girls Gone Wild to family-friendly fun. And it worked. Followers were far less likely to limit their perception of Mardi Gras to the three B’s—Beer, Beads, and B…
Instead, they saw it as a family-friendly tailgate, where parents and their kids hung out, ate an insane amount of food, and had a great time. A place where family-friendly brands could feel safe activating or supporting Mardi Gras: the biggest free show on earth.
Perception equals reality, right up to the point of experience
Or does it? Is experience truly the harbinger of brand perception? One would think so, but the 2010 data suggested that maybe social media exposure was more powerful than actual firsthand memory.
Social Media Is More Powerful Than Actual Brand Experience
One thing I didn’t do in 2009 that I did in 2010 was segment the survey by Mardi Gras attendance. The goal with the segmentation was to understand how brand perception would change based on prior direct experience with Mardi Gras.
It’s one thing to change brand perception amongst folks who have never experienced the event or brand you’re trying to affect. But it’s quite another to change someone’s point of view after they’ve actually had firsthand experience.
Or so I thought.
Here was the baseline—the total sample set before and after the brand linkage campaign. Note that it is strikingly similar to the 2009 numbers, but the Church number fluctuates between pre- and post-survey periods. Keep an eye on the bar charts highlighted in red. These are the three key drivers – Flashing, Crazy, and Family. Watch how they change when we look at folks who have and have not attended Mardi Gras in the past.
The chart below is people who have NEVER ATTENDED Mardi Gras. Look how much lower the Family linkage (pre-survey) is vs the overall sample set. This is the Girls Gone Wild effect. These folks think Mardi Gras is all about flashing and crazy.
Now, let’s look at how the data changes when you pull out those folks who HAVE ATTENDED Mardi Gras in the past. They’ve been there, seen it firsthand. So you’d think that our little campaign wouldn’t really cause a huge change in their brand perception. And you’d be wrong.
Remember, these folks have all been to an actual Mardi Gras. As you can see, they were far more likely to link Family to Mardi Gras in the pre-survey than among non-attendees. They were also less likely to attach Crazy and Flashing, which makes sense… because if you’ve ever been here for Mardi Gras and actually go outside the Quarter, you see the real Mardi Gras – one that’s pretty family friendly.
But here again, by exposing them to the campaign, we were able to significantly reduce Crazy and Flashing linkage and likewise increase Family.
My Mardi Gras Experience: Using Social Media to Manage Brand Perception
The data here tells the story. If you’re not using social media and its cousin content marketing to build, enhance, and manage your brand’s perception, you’re missing a huge opportunity in the sales & marketing space. And yes, while this was more of a consumer-driven experiment, you can leverage social to define or manage your B2B brand’s value proposition.
A brand is a brand. And people are people. If you focus on showing them rather than telling them what you want them to believe about your brand, you’ll communicate your brand more accurately.
Are You Using Social Media To Manage Brand Perception?
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