Celebrity Endorsement, a new option for the Conversation Manager?

Home Celebrity Endorsement, a new option for the Conversation Manager?

You probably didn’t miss the fact that Charlie Sheen has a verified twitteraccount and set a new Guiness World Record by racking up 1 million Twitter followers in the shortest time ever.

But did you ever heard of Ad.ly?

After signing up Charlie received 1 million followers in 25 hours and 17 minutes. A lot of conversation managers can only dream about these figures. We all struggle with the ROI of social media, but thanks to the Celebrity Endorsement activities of Ad.ly Charlie has no problem with that at all!

Celebrity Endorsement in social media

Ad.ly helps brands to connect with consumers via influential celebrities, athletes and artists on Facebook and Twitter. More than 1,000 celebrities in social media work with Ad.ly. The whole proces of Celebrity Endorsements has 5 simple steps:

  1. Matching: The Celebrities and their fan base are matched with brands based on the brand’s campaign objectives and target audience. To test which celebrities gets the best results, 10-50 celebrities are usually selected in this step.
  2. Creative: The in-house copywriting team of Ad.ly creates the copy for the campaign with an optimal balance between the brand’s goals and the celebrities’ need to sound authentic.
  3. Pricing: Pricing is a flat fee per status update per celebrity. The price depends on the size of the celebrity’s fan base, the amount of engagement between the celebrity and their fans, and the prior performance of the celebrity’s endorsements.
  4. Execution: In this step the whole campaign is executed.
  5. Measurement: From the start the campaign performance and the results per celebrity is monitored to finetune the campaign.

More than 150 brands including Sony, Microsoft, AT&T, Toyota, NBC and Best Buy have used Celebrity Endorsement to reach out to their target audience. According to Ad.ly Charlie Sheen contacted them because he would like to have an unfiltered connection with his fans, but with the involvement of Ad.ly monetizing Charlie’s digital presence might also be a reason.

So if you’re following a celebrity you may have received a “Wow this is great ….” status update in your timeline, but if the sender is part of the Ad.ly network that update might not be written by the celebrity at all!

Today Internships released an infographic with the initial results for this single tweet of Charlie:

Impressive results! Although I remember several discussions about bloggers being payed for a blogposting, Ad.ly seems to operate under the radar so far. Luckily in social media the user is in control so if you think Charlie’s Cashing on Craziness is too much just Unfollow or Unfriend him. Next friday it’s the Worldwide Unfollow Charlie Sheen on Twitter Day, that won’t stop Charlie but it will clear your timeline.

What do you think? Is Celebrity Endorsement a new tool for the Conversation Manager or not?