If you are from Saskatchewan* you’d be hard pressed not to have heard of the campaign to save the Sask Film Employment Tax Credit. Since the Saskatchewan Party cut the credit in the latest budget the province has erupted in protest. Almost 8500 people have sign a petition asking the government to reduce their decision. There have been rallies. Thousands have tweeted, and retweeted messages of protest. Elaborate videos have been created. It’s been liked, commented and shared out of the kazoo.

The folks involved in opposing the government have been very effective of mounting their resistance and letting their voices be heard. Politics aside, this all serves as an interesting marketing case study.

They’ve really nailed the four C’s of building a movement (both on and offline):

1. Caring

One of the foundations of any movement is that people need to care. They need to be fired up. Emotional. They need to be willing to put a ‘pause’ on their day-to-day lives in order to take the time to get involved.

Many cause marketing efforts struggle because they lack a foundation in emotion. I’ve seen it over and over again.

In this example I actually think the government accelerated their own resistance. Had they simply phased in small incremental clawbacks the industry would have likely had difficulty mobilizing.  People rarely get emotional about small changes in their lives. But, because the government tore the jugular of an entire industry with the swipe of a pen, they forced thousands of people to worry about their livelihood. Fear of well-being is a powerful motivator.

If the government was looking to get between a momma bear and her cubs, mission accomplished.

2. Community

A bunch of individual people who care about an issue isn’t a community. It’s a crowd. Caring isn’t enough to start a movement. It takes leadership. It takes organization.

The industry was lucky to have a bunch of media savvy (and community-minded) folks amongst their midsts. It was less than a day from the budget announcement before I started to see tweets about the issue. And shortly after a Facebook page was established. Within days the community had a leadership structure, formalized roles and a strategy to define their resistance.

3. Content

Once you have a community of caring individuals, the goal of the movement is to snowball. 10 people today, 100 people tomorrow and so on. To do this you need to get your message shared. You need to get other people fired up. You need to convince other people to care. And finally you need a way they can join, participate and belong to the community.

To do that in social media today you need great content. Emotional content. Content that is shareable. Content that begs to be viewed; listened to; or read.

If I’ve learned one thing from the Sask Film Employment Tax Credit example, it’s that you don’t fuck (pardon the language) with an industry of content producers. Damn, these people know how to tell stories. Check some of their content out here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH0TUPl5Dnw , here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4XIdJyjpjc  and here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPEBc_9bxCk.

Conversely, the government’s only content is the odd press release or off-handed remark on Twitter. They’re getting hammered with great content and their defense is driven by a communications strategy devised in the 1960s.

4. Conversation

If you want your movement to be successful you need to be talked about. You need to be on the top of people’s minds. Lack of conversation leads to less emotion, which equates to apathy and your community shrinking.

The Sask Film folks have been successful at driving the conversation and being at the forefront despite the government’s attempts to ‘turn the channel’ (come on, Mulcair can’t be the most important issue in the Government today). Simply put, you need to keep people talking.

What are your thoughts? What makes a great movement? What did I miss?

*Actually this is no longer a Sask-only story. It’s been talked about world-wide. In fact any savings from cutting the tax credit have surely been eroded by the bad PR the province has received. I’m normally a supporter of our government, but this decision doesn’t make sense to me (in my humble opinion).

Monday night I was out fishing at the pond when my phone rang.

Paraphrasing the conversation…

“Hi I’m calling from Shaw. How are you tonight?” the girl asked.

“Really good, how are you?” I replied.

“Wow, nobody ever asks me that.”

“Well I’m nice like that. How can I help you?”

“We would like to upgrade your internet – because your a good customer who always pays his bills on time – to be faster for only an extra $3 per month. But, I’m told I can only offer you the promotion if you agree to try our cable for six months. It’s free to try the cable for that time-period, and you can cancel at anytime.” she explained.

“Really, you can only offer it if I get the cable?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m told.”

I smell a rat.

“Well, if I order it and get it installed can I cancel the next day without any penalties?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“That doesn’t seem very profitable for you. I mean you’re going to send somebody out to my house and I cancel the next day it seems like you would lose money.”

“Just wait I’ll be right back.”

“No problem, I’m sitting beside a lake. It’s a beautiful night.”

“You’re sitting beside a lake? I was on the lake on the weekend.”

A little banter back and forth on the lake. It seems like we are now becoming friends. A short pause and she comes back on the line.

“So would you like to make the upgrade?”

“Sure, so do you think you can get me to change my tv watching habits in six months. Trying to get me hooked on cable?”

Pause.

“Ok, I’ve made the change” she said and we continued to schedule an appointment for the install.

Two days pass. A thought pops into my mind. I wonder what the catch is?

So, I hop onto the Shaw site and take a look.

It turned out the offer is available to anybody without the cable. And, although it’s only $3 more the new package offered me considerably less bandwidth than what I currently have. Plus if I forget to give them notice my bill would double after the promotion.

I immediately called Shaw and cancelled the upgrade and cable installation.

Two hours later their installation guy showed up at our door (they forgot to call him). I kindly told him the story and sent him on his way.

Duping your customers like this is a desperate marketing strategy. It’s insulting and deceitful and in the long-run this bullshit really accumulates with people.

It’s a completely short sighted marketing (businesses) strategy.

Until the call I was a perfectly happy Shaw customer. Now I’m searching for other internet options. And for what? A chance to get me watching cable again.

Next time the phone rings while I’m at the lake I’m totally hitting ignore.

A few months back I got into a discussion with a colleague over the difference between communications and marketing.

My colleague proclaimed that communications was about the act of conveying a message with the hope of ultimately influencing peoples’ behavior.

The example he referenced was using communications to persuade society to wear seat belts. He said that communicators repeated the message ‘wear your seatbelt’ over-and-over-again, using a variety of appeals, until culture had shifted and people started wearing them.

It was a process of hitting the nail repeatedly with a blunt hammer.

I responded, “A marketer would have looked at that problem and said, ‘Perhaps we should make the car beep and a display light up when the seat belts are not being worn?’”

An extreme marketer would have made it so the car won’t drive without people wearing their belts.

Everything we do communicates. Communications, however, is only one small part of marketing.

Over the last month I’ve been tracking stats for just about every University Facebook page in Canada. Everyday I run a program which provides me with a daily like count, talking about count, post count, post likes, post comments and post shares for over ninety different pages. It’s an amazing way to quickly see the types of content that lead to more fan engagement and which type of content makes people want to kick you in the junk.

Below are a few of my general observations.

Please note that these are general observations only and not a statistical analysis, and although this data is from Canadian higher education, the observations below seem to make sense across other industries.

Having a high number of Facebook fans is positively correlated with the number of people ‘talking about you.’  

It may seem obvious but there seems to be a connection between the number fans and the number of people ‘talking about you’. Simply put, having more fans could equate to a larger number of folks mentioning you.

Growth in Facebook fans is not correlated with the number of admin managed posts.

It seemed that pages without a great number of posts seemed to grow just as fast as those that were posting more frequently. This isn’t to say that quality posts don’t increase fan growth rate it just means that posting all the time isn’t going to increase your growth rate in a linear fashion. It seems that over posting dud content like press releases seems to lead to more ‘unlikes’ and is more harmful than under posting.

Having a high number of Facebook fans is not correlated with the amount of engagement on each post.

Whether you have 20,000 fans or 400, your opportunity for post engagement seemed to be about the same. In fact many well-managed smaller pages did just as well at attracting likes, comments and shares as many of the big schools.

Mediocre content leads to mediocre fan engagement. Great content leads to great fan engagement.

Mediocre content = press releases, basic announcements and event details. These all seemed to really land with a thud. Often when I noticed a decrease in number of fans day-to-day it was because of this type of content.

Great content =  moments of key celebration, well-chosen and dynamic photos, kick ass videos, thought provoking questions or posts that really added value.

So what does all of this mean?

Being large is great if you can be. It will likely help you get more mentions. However, even small organizations can have a well-managed and engaging page even if it doesn’t have a bazillion fans.

It’s about interaction; not the shear number of fans.

Posting more content does not equate to the page being ‘better managed.’ Forget about the number of posts and focus on posting a smaller number of true gems. If people aren’t liking, commenting or sharing your posts…you’re on the wrong track.

Forget about the garbage press releases and announcements and focus on engaging with your fans.

This last week we had the opportunity to buy a different vehicle. For most people the process would have been a simple transaction, but for me it was a time to observe marketing at its best, and at its worst.

At its best, I was amazed at how car manufacturers have really dialed into potential buyers’ pain points, and have served up a total package focused on delaying that pain as a means to drive sales today.

For example, car companies know that the average person likely doesn’t have the capacity to drop cash on a new car. They know that people are afraid of making big buying decisions. Their response is to offer cheap and flexible financing.

They take that pain and delay it until sometime in the future.

Another pain most consumers feel is worrying about the price of gas and whether they will have enough money to put fuel in their car. Auto companies know this, so, as smart marketers should, they’ve adapted their product and communications to help delay the pain.

For example the particular car we purchased has a special fuel saving mode and a visual feedback display (a color coded LED) to let you know whether you are driving in a fuel efficient manner. For the consumer it makes you feel like you will be more in control of the amount of fuel you use, and thereby reduces the fear and pain when purchasing today.

Of course, in both of these examples the pain is only delayed.

In the case of financing, eventually you’ll have a bill to pay. And, inevitably you are going to pay for gas. Even so, delaying pain can be a powerful way to overcome people’s purchasing fears.

The worst: salesmen who came up through the used car lots. Ugh, just a minute in a room with one of these guys made me want to punch him in the nose (for the record our salesperson was great, but his manager was a complete a-hole).

P.S. The special fuel saving feedback mechanism has had an unintended consequence on me: now I’m hyper aware of the fuel I’m using, which serves to fuel my post-purchase dissonance.