Today at BEA, Chicago web development company Mess is launching Momentum, a turnkey subscription service that can be used to generate social media campaigns and manage and track the fan social engagement with them.
Promoting books on social media has never been more important. Momentum offers publishers the ability to create and manage “social unlock” campaigns—essentially asking people on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest or elsewhere to share, RT, comment or like a social media page in exchange for a reward. After a certain number of actions have been achieved—say 1,000 likes or 1,000 RTs—the publisher will unlock some kind of desirable content for the fans.
Social unlock campaigns have proven to be successful for publishers, according to Jack Shedd, director of Made by Mess, the Mess unit that created Momentum. Unlock the One, a social unlock campaign run last year by HarperTeen, generated more than 300,000 shares around the globe. Fans of novelist Kiera Cass’s Selection series were promised the first 10 chapters of her next book if they would share the hashtag #UnlockTheOne.
Social unlocks allow publishers to deliver desirable content to fans—excerpts, videos, or any kind of content reward—and track the activities online in real-time. But, Shedd said, up until now creating social unlock campaigns, and tracking them, involved customized coding at great expense. “Our social unlock campaigns were very successful, but our clients had to pay us a lot of money to do them,” he said.
Shedd’s company—which has worked with a variety of large trade publishers over the years—rebuilt the technology they were using to make it more robust and cheaper to use. The result, Shedd said, is Momentum, a subscription service he claims will reduce the cost of managing and tracking social unlocks. For a monthly fee, Momentum offers tiered levels of services—users can track one campaign on one network or pay extra to track 25 campaigns on every network—aimed at attracting big publishers and small presses.
Momentum subscribers get access to a dashboard that allows them to easily create and manage social unlock campaigns. The user logs in, clicks create campaign, indicates which social networks to track, creates a challenge—choose to tweet, share, post, like, etc.—picks the number of actions needed to unlock content, and the reward fans will get when that number its achieved. Next, the user creates a widget—a short piece of code that can be dropped on any website and show up as an icon offering the social unlock challenge. Momentum also offers analytics that tracks down to individual users and their social media activities and then stores all this data from across every social network.
Momentum will be showing off the platform during BEA at booth #DZ1971.
“Until now, social media advertising was largely a pay to play game of sponsoring ads and buying likes and shares across different platforms,” Shedd said. “Momentum is changing that dynamic by engaging existing fans directly which is more cost-effective and offers better results than traditional display advertising.”
