Marketers are wrestling with the question of how to deal with the “social media.” It’s not surprising that they’re having trouble with this issue, because the social media–sites like MySpace, YouTube, Orkut, and the like—do not provide a natural environment for most brands. Most brands have nothing to contribute to the social interaction that takes place on the sites, because they don’t fit in and they don’t add anything of value.
Perhaps the best analogy for a social network is a party . . .
Your friends have invited you to a party, and you anticipate having a good time. Like a good guest, you bring something, such as a bottle of wine. When you first arrive, you gravitate toward the people you know, but as the evening wears on, you end up talking to guests you’ve never met before. You may be introduced by a mutual friend, or you may just introduce yourselves.
You will hit it off with some of these people, but not others. With someone who’s fun and shares your interests, you may want to develop an ongoing relationship. But when you’re caught with the guy who talks, incessantly, about himself or his stamp collection, you’ll probably want to escape as soon as you can. And you may approach a few people who appear promising, but after a few minutes, you conclude that they have nothing to say.
Now let’s think about a brand that wants to join MySpace, or post ads to YouTube. Just like a guest at a party, the brand better bring something with it. In the case of YouTube, it could just be a good TV ad, preferably one that’s amusing and has an element of surprise, so that people will want to talk about it. On MySpace, it could be a fun or interesting profile. But it better be a real profile, not a fake one. And it better be interesting, not lame. Think about how you’d feel if you found out that that the person you’d been talking to was making up their life history to seem more interesting. That’s what it’s like to come across one of those brand profiles which pretend that the brand is something it’s not.
But bringing something of interest or value is just the “price of entry.” A brand needs to reach out to people, not sit and wait for people to seek it out. It needs to initiate conversations, not just react to them. And of course, that’s the trap for most brands. They confuse social media with traditional communication channels, and they do what they know: talk at people instead of with them.
The truth is that there are only a few communication channels that actually enable a conversation: e-mail, instant messenger, mobile phone, blogs and message boards. And most brands have neither the bandwidth nor the experience to hold an interesting and individual conversation with their consumers.
Jones Soda, however, was talking with people one-on-one long before MySpace or YouTube made the big time. The company had also tapped into another element that’s critical to social media: personalization. You can still submit photos to appear on the brand’s labels. Check out the string of designs.
And, of course, the fact that there are so many labels out there means that people are going to collect them. Collecting is another plus in the world of social media. Just think of how people collect “friends” on MySpace or viewings on YouTube.
So Jones Soda is a brand that is geared up to take advantage of the world of social media. But that means it doesn’t have to, because its ardent fans are already doing it.
If you know people who have strong affection for your brand, you could ask them to help your brand get out a bit more –maybe invite it to one of their parties and introduce it around. But if you don’t have brand advocates lined up, you need to do something that will get your brand talked about. Burger King’s creepy King character has certainly become a focal point of male teens online, but, as Rance Crain pointed out in a recent AdAge article, that may be a dangerous strategy for a mass-market brand such as Burger King. What is provocative social currency to one group is potentially insulting and demeaning to others. And, like it or not, Burger King gets a lot of its revenue and profit from people who are not young males.
So when it comes to social media, a brand that tries to crash the party without careful preparation risks being written off as a wallflower or a bore. Worse, brands that pretend to be something they are not risk being condemned as con artists.
So before you post your brand’s profile online, ask yourself: is my brand a party animal or a one-trick pony?
(36 votes, average: 2.92 out of 5)
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October 18th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
Nigel,
This could be the smartest thing you’ve ever written. You reference brands that enter the social media sphere by creating profiles of themselves, such as on MySpace. Certainly, brands should reach out to consumers in authentic, meaningful ways — ways that add value to the relationship. But, back to those brands who create fake, contrived profiles of themselves, my observation is this: it’s a shame, they never cultivated brand fans who volunteer to do create profiles for them, so they have to do it themselves, in desperation. A great example of a brand with fans on MySpace: WaWa.
But this leads to a fundamental point: listening. Brands usually don’t give a damn about listening to people, only averages and masses. That’s demeaning to people and creates artificial walls between companies, employees and the customers they’re supposed to be serving. With marketers increasingly losing the invitation by consumers to enter into their lives, the successful marketers will be those that learn the art and science of valuing attention, learning to read and anticipate guestures, and, most importantly, respect the consumers they have wrongly called masses.
October 19th, 2006 at 7:27 am
Max, thanks for a good addition to the post. I mentioned conversation and talking with people not at them but, of course, listening is critical to a good conversation. I hear you!
October 19th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Nigel - this is right on the money and the big challenge is that brands are unfamiliar with the notion of having “real” conversations and using the right language. From what I have seen, figuring out who within the organisation has the mandate to engage directly with consumers in this way is a big challenge. What approvals do they need to post responses, how frank will they really be allowed to be, would it be better if they engage as a private individual who “happens to work for the brand” and if they do that will there be a higher level of trust engendered? Probably. The other issue is one of the new level of volatility that Myspace and Youtube bring - if there’s some bad news it can spread far more quickly than before and brand owners in virtually all cases are not able to respond quickly due to the lengthy internal approval processes they feel they need to have in place to “protect” their reputation. Just my $0.02
October 19th, 2006 at 11:57 am
Two cents that are worth having, Fergus. Thank you.
Presumably you would agree with Max that the first step is to listen in order to understand the issues and language used to discuss them?
I definitely agree that the speed and dispersion of bad news is a new challenge. In days gone by if a company had its act together it could get a pre-emptive message out before most people knew there was a problem. Now, as we saw with the Dell battery recall, a pre-emptive announcement can itself become the catalyst for a wave of discontent to ripple through the blogosphere and from there into the mass media (or vice versa).
October 23rd, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Someone asked me for an example of a brand bringing something to the social media “party”. Luckily John Winsor recently added this post about Nokia’s video, originally referenced by David Weinberger. The question is can Nokia hold up its end of the conversation now it is at the party?
What other examples of mainstream brands can you think of that have become successful party animals?
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Excellent article Nigel, thank you.
There are two potential reasons a brand would care about having presence on these sites – that’s where the eyeballs are, or that’s where the young mindspace is.
It’s hard, maybe even expensive, but certainly possible to get a brand’s message in front of this same audience via other media, but there’s nowhere can equal these places for currency and relevance. If a brand would have a relevant presence here, by definition it has relevant presence with this audience (and by ‘relevant presence’, I mean it has a point of view worthy of discussion).
If a brand is looking at the social networking phenomenon and worrying that it couldn’t maintain a relevant presence, that’s a valuable (if scary) signal that the brand hasn’t a clear vision of how it could contribute to the social dialogue.
The most salient brands have attitudes, beliefs and values. There’s a fantastic opportunity to reinforce them by taking public positions on issues, prompting discussions.
Even before aiming as high as MySpace or YouTube, I believe there’d be huge value for any brand to start with a blog on its own website, with postings at least four times per week. Considering the global and public nature of the Internet, those postings would need to be authorised at a very high level within any company but if a brand team was committed to posting something several times per week, any cumbersome internal process would soon need to be circumvented, and the attitudes, beliefs, values espoused by the brand made clear to all instead.
If postings are about the brand or product features or benefits, it will lose visitors in a flash.
On the other hand, they’ll engage with positions, enter into dialogue or discussions, with a correspondent (representing a brand) with a consistent attitude, belief and values system. Only once these training wheels are off should a brand consider stepping into the big game.
October 24th, 2006 at 2:30 am
Just as TV facilitated the growth of packaged goods brands — just think of the origin of soap operas — won’t so-called social media facilitate the growth of new types of brands.
Brands may need to have a point of view…a good example would be Ogilvy’s work for Dove. Or the HSBC campaign which is built around “points of view” or the AOL campaign from Grey. These brands are starting a debate on the web and by taking a position or stimulating this debate have a reason to be there. They’re not like your dad at your party.
October 25th, 2006 at 8:33 am
Hi Mark, thanks for an interesting comment.
Without doubt social media will facilitate the growth of new brands. Right now, however, most of those new brands are actually people not products.
Brands absolutely need to have a point of view. If a brand wants to be successful it needs to stand for something (in addition to having a good business model and great brand experience) but having a point of view does not mean you will be accepted as part of the social scene. You may be respected for taking a stand or you may be rejected for taking a stand, but who wants someone shouting from the soapbox when everyone else is trying to have a good time? Debates take place in other venues: coffee shops, the local pub, dinner with friends, not at a party.
Dove is an excellent example of a brand taking a stand but does it have a profile on MySpace? If it does I can’t find it. The Dove ads are posted on YouTube but the number of views is relatively small and most probably come from people in the industry. This is not a criticism of Dove’s efforts. Rather I applaud them. I would, however, question whether social media is a good place to pursue them. Like it or not, I have a vision of a bunch of young males running riot with what is really an important cause.
Am I wrong? Is Dove a success in the social media space and I just don’t know it? Please let me know.
October 27th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Well, no one seemed to want to enlighten me as to whether Dove was on MySpace but I did find the ads on YouTube.
The latest one “Evolution” is getting a lot of attention and will be the subject of a post next week. It is sad to note, however, that this lame contribution from Wendy’s is getting even more attention.
You can also find the original Self Esteem Fund ad online along with some spoofs:
Original ad.
Dog self esteem fund.
And here is a spoof of “Evolution” for the boys.