How to beat 'em AND join 'em
Brands are becoming more astute at harnessing the power of social media. But having tweaked your facebook page, set up a Twitter account and seeded your TV ad on YouTube, what comes next?
The big networks are a collection of hundreds of thousands of smaller groups each based around friends, interests or hobbies. For a brand to communicate with all these separate groups and hope to reach any kind of consensus would be an enormous task.
So, what’s the alternative?
Many brands are building their own destination sites that mirror the functionality from the big social networks but they’re a more comfortable and productive environment for brands to work in.
Take Dells’ Ideas Storm, My Starbucks idea and Martha Stewarts Community for example - all very successful for their owners.
But as more brands follow suit this presents an increasing problem for the community users.
If I am a member of facebook, twitter, Dell ideas and six other communities, I have to have a separate profile for each one, upload pictures, change my status and add content to all of them and unless I am very dedicated, I won’t.
This problem has the potential to scupper a brand’s plans to launch their own community-based platform but there is an answer.
Rather than each community site being a separate island, why not build bridges and connecting all of them?
Tools like Facebook Connect and Open Social allow brand owners to build communities that link with and can share content with hundreds of other sites.
This sharing ability means there are no barriers for users to enter and contribute to a brand’s site and if your destination is attractive, your own community can be empowered to help to save the brand thousands in R&D and plot its future.
In an increasingly fragmented social media space brands should not be trying to force users to choose between their network and a large network like Facebook. In almost all occasions the big network will win. Instead, working with those big networks not only gets more users but also can provide numerous other benefits too.
