Was it the Soup Nazi, the Talking Babies, the Chimps?

Mine may surprise you because it didn’t air on the Super Bowl and it was quickly pulled off the internet.  It was produced by Loopnet, one of the top web sources for Commercial Real Estate information. It’s a cute ad, but more importantly, it was a great demonstration of the power of Social Media:

 

Social Media gives anyone the ability to produce their own Super Bowl Ad and potentially reach hundreds of millions of viewers.

Unfortunately for Loopnet, about an hour after I saw the ad via Linked-In, it was pulled.  Apparently anyone can have a Super Bowl ad, but the NFL has trademarked the phrase “Super Bowl” which can only be used in ads by official sponsors.

So, does Social Media work? I’ve been working at Commercial Real Estate Social Media for a little over a year and  we are starting to get some traction.  We have established Danburg as a brand, people in the industry and in the community know who we are, and if you Google office space or warehouse in Boca Raton, chances are you’ll find us easily.  Social Media is also helping us change our positioning from a portfolio of properties to a community of businesses. Even if you don’t want to read about Poodles, Baseball, Guys in Chicken Suits, or Economic Development in Boca Raton, we are putting a lot of interesting and valuable content out there. Every day we see more and more people opening our e-mails, visiting our web site, finding us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.

But back to the Super Bowl ad. We certainly don’t have the budget for a $3.5 million ad. Furthermore, our target market is very localized, so there is no need to go national. It looks like Loopnet may be getting a big influx of cash from CoStar, but it certainly wouldn’t make a lot of sense for them to be spending that kind of money on a Super Bowl ad.

But Social Media gives firms like Danburg Management or Loopnet the ability to post viral content that has the potential to reach as many viewers as the Super Bowl. And we can do it for almost $3.5 million less. Therein lies the power of Social Media. We are working on some video content for 2012 and we may just produce a Super Bowl ad for 2013. We’re up to over 260,000 hits on a baseball video I did a year ago, so the potential is there to reach a very large audience. We may not be able to duplicate that performance, but we have some pretty good ideas and will be trying. One lesson we’ve learned, we’ll call it our “Big Game” ad.

Though our blog, our Youtube channel and our mailing list, we have the potential to reach more people than the Super Bowl. There may be 100 million Super Bowl viewers, but there are 800 million people on Facebook, 300 million on Twitter and my personal Linked-in contacts connect me to over 6.1 million professionals. I’m hoping that this post reaches each and every one of them; and that somehow, somewhere, someone knows someone else who is looking to lease some great office or warehouse space in Boca Raton.  Kudos to Loopnet for a great idea and it’s a shame it had one major flaw.

– Ken Silberling – Director of Business Development