Like many of you, I get a lot of unsolicited email newsletters. I delete most of them without reading, but every now and again something catches my attention. For example, I stopped to look at a recent email titled “The Real Social Media Trends of 2010,” but within a few minutes I realized that it was just another misguided effort to promote social media as a marketing silver bullet. Don’t people realize that the real catalyst for social media success is a strong brand?

In an effort to research my upcoming presentation at the 2010 Corporate Image & Branding Conference in New York, I have been delving into the world of social media, examining the successful social media brands and trying to identify what they have in common. Yes, these brands have a lot of fans and followers. But they also tend to be strong, well-known, and well-liked brands. This observation suggests that fans are as much an end result of effective brand building as a means to further it.

My conclusion results from a comparison of brands that have been lauded for their successful use of social media to others in the same product category. Using lists from  mashable.com, thekbuzz.com, and thebigmoney.com, I identified brands suitable for the analysis. I then matched the number of fans on their Facebook Fan Pages with data from Millward Brown’s BrandZ database.

I defined a successful social media brand as one with over 250,000 fans on Facebook. Winners on this criterion included Southwest, Honda, VW, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Subway, KFC, Dunkin’ Donuts, Krispy Kreme, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Red Bull. On average these brands have 1.6 million fans each.

In the chart below, I’ve compared the average brand pyramid of these brands with the average of all the other brands that a) were included in our BrandZ analysis and b) have Facebook pages.

On average these “other” brands have 140,000 fans each. Across the five product categories (airlines, cars, fast food, coffee houses, and soft drinks), the correlation between the percent at “Bonding” (a metric that describes strong attitudinal affinity)  and the number of Facebook fans is 0.69. On average, the more loyal customers you have, the more fans you tend to have on Facebook. The successful social media brands are simply stronger brands.

A comparison of Coca-Cola and Red Bull, the carbonated soft drinks with the most Facebook fans, identifies two different drivers of success. Coca-Cola is the sixth strongest brand in the world according to its Bonding score. Coca-Cola is well-known and well-loved, trustworthy and desirable. 

Red Bull is a very strong brand, but it is a niche brand.  Thus its bonding is relatively low, even though it does have a strong international presence. It has more fans than we might expect based on its Bonding score. But arguably Red Bull is not a carbonated soft drink. Red Bull is an energy drink. As it created the category, its focus on people with active minds and lifestyles allowed it to transcend countries and cultures. Just as Coke is the leading global cola, Red Bull is the leading energy drink. It is seen to be different from other carbonated soft drinks; it is dynamic, rebellious, adventurous, assertive.

Both brands have strong visibility within their category, albeit through very different mechanisms. As a mass-market brand, Coca-Cola tends to favor mass media to promote its brand positioning (not that it is shy about using non-traditional media, either). As noted in a previous post , Red Bull engages in intense grass-roots marketing. Rather than sponsor other people’s events, Red Bull seeks to create its own: from the Red Bull air race to the Formula 1, from Word Clash street poems to Art of the Can. But for both brands, Facebook represents just one more touch point, just one more means to engage existing fans and keep them loyal.

Next week I will consider why big is also beautiful when it comes to viral video, but for now please let me know your responses to this post. Thank you.

 Email This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Brands, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Print this Page