1. How Hits Happen or, What Was The Tipping Point? Dan Calladine

2. How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point? / The eternal question / Yes, you know it generated sales and hit the targets / But how did it happen?

3. How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point? / Advertising campaigns always start big / Social media campaigns are less easy to control / Often a story or idea will take a few days or weeks to take off / Different metrics are needed – mentions, authority and pass alongs, not impressions & clicks

4. How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point? / New tracking tools let us record these metrics / These tools show us how stories, promotions and ideas spread / To measure tipping points I’ve looked at two stories and a sales promotion / I’ve used the buzz tracking tool Radian 6 to trace the spark that ignited the story and took it to a wider audience / (Other buzz tracking tools are available)

5. How Hits Happen – or, What Was The Tipping Point? / With big stories there is too much clutter to work through / Too many simultaneous promotions to identify the key spark / I’ve looked at stories that did not become hits until they had been in the public domain for a few days / 3 Stories / Spotify & Universal Music / Guinness is Good For You / Catch a Choo promotional campaign

6. 1 – Spotify & Universal Music / Universal Music announced on 10 th August that they made more revenue in Sweden from Spotify than iTunes

7. Why did the story take 2 weeks to become a hit? / Only 25 mentions the day after the original story, including 22 on twitter Original story Search on ‘Spotify’ + ‘Universal’

8. Example of a tweet on 11 th August / This user had 2,000 followers / Yet the story then ran out of steam

9. What happened on the 24 th August? What happened? Search on ‘Spotify’ + ‘Universal’

10. Mainstream media happened! / The Daily Telegraph featured the stat in a larger story about Spotify

11. The follow up / This was then featured in other large traffic blogs and by multiple tweeters / Many referred to the Daily Telegraph as their source

12. Lessons / A story or idea can disappear even it it’s strong / It a story about your brand has disappeared, try to make it part of a future news story or comment / Mainstream media is still very important as a source / When using twitter it’s not enough to have one person tweeting once – try to orchestrate a campaign across multiple users

13. 2 – Guinness is good for you / In November 2003 some American academics wrote a research paper, arguing that Guinness genuinely was good for you / This suddenly became one of the most-viewed stories on the BBC Website in July 2009 – why?

14. What happened to make this popular in 2009? Search on ‘Guinness’ + ‘Good For You’ What happened?

15. High Traffic Sites / The influential financial site Motley Fool featured the story on it’s UK site on 27 th July, as an intro to a story on Diageo’s profit figures

16. The link was then posted onto the Fodor’s Travel Forum / Hetismij, the poster, is a very well respected community member / He has started over 100 forum topics

17. The link was then tweeted / In all there were 126 mentions of the story on 29 th July, making the story one of the most-read on the BBC site

18. Lessons / Something from the past can come back to haunt you or boost you / Stories spread well on sites with high authority / Similarly, active community members with high levels of respect and trust can spread stories well

19. 3 – Jimmy Choo’s Trainer Hunt / On 9 th April Jimmy Choo started a real-life game using twitter and Foursquare to launch a new pair of trainers / A representative moved around London, announcing when she entered a venue / If you caught her, you won the trainers

20. But why did it only become a hit on the 27 th April? Search on ‘Jimmy Choo’ +Foursquare What happened?

21. In early – mid April it was featured in multiple fashion blogs

22. Plus some tweets from fashion & marketing people

23. But it was a post on Mashable that ignited the campaign

24. Mashable created… / 1883 re-tweets / 1146 shares on Facebook / 1146 ‘Likes’ / Multiple subsequent blog posts / The story went mainstream

25. The story also went offline – the ‘hit’ is now the story

26. (She eventually got caught)

27. Lessons / Seed story to relevant target markets / Also seed to larger media who may have interest in story / High traffic sources can yield the best response / Once it’s a hit, make that the story / Learn, and repeat

28. Where to find me / dan.calladine@carat.com dan.calladine@carat.com / http://twitter.com/dancall / http://digital-examples.blogspot.com / http://digital-stats.blogspot.com