Brands need a social home
Social media is rapidly becoming one of the largest media and communications outlets in history. In May this year, 80% of the UK online population used a social network - that’s nearly 30 million people.
This continuing growth is opening up massive opportunities for brands, when handled properly.
There have been a large number of very successful social media campaigns. Dell’s twitter campaign generated over $3million dollars of revenue. Then there was Burger King’s famous Dark Whopper (burn a friend) campaign on Facebook.
Despite the successes of others and to some extent because of the successes of others, some brands are starting to run into problems.
As social platforms grow, more and more brands are advertising on them with increasing budgets, increasing expectations and increasing creativity. It’s like a mainstream social network arms race, one where those with the biggest budgets are usually winning.
The other major issue now facing brands is the size, scale and diversity of the social network users. Unlike a TV station or a newspaper, the demographics for these massive social media platforms are massively diverse.
A Facebook user could be a 14-year-old boy in Nebraska or a 50-year-old woman in Buenos Aries. Trying to correctly target campaigns to the right groups within the right networks is a job in itself.
Are we saying don’t use the mainstream social networks?
No. Brands can’t ignore the big social media sites and prosper, not now and not in the future; this is particularly true for consumer brands.
Brands must get their messages out to the people who inhabit social media. The real question is what to do with them once you have.
Sure, you can set up fan pages and get people to add an image to their profile page saying that they are a fan of your brand, but is that it?
Whether it’s your shop, your web page or your event, the marketing objective has always been to get someone’s interest via an advertising platform and then move them to your place where they can interact with you. Social media should be the same.
If you applied this trusted and proven technique to social media there is only one conclusion...
Brands need their own social spaces.
The benefit of a brand building its own social networking or community site comes from creating a place where one can form for a direct relationship with its audience. If you’re a fan of English rugby for example, you’re more than likely going to http://www.rfu.com to get information and news about the team already. So what better place to gather with other fans than via the RFU’s own social network?
This applies to retail, travel, banking, utilities and almost every other industry where brands need to communicate with an audience.
Dell, for example, has one of the most sophisticated social media marketing engines. They have used it to bring in millions of dollars of incremental revenue every year. And like most brands, Dell has a presence in the big social networks. Fan clubs in Facebook, photo streams in Flickr and a very active Twitter account. But, they realised several years ago that this wasn’t enough.
Up until this point, Dell didn’t speak to their community in their own space; they relied on someone else to facilitate the conversation.
So Dell started there own spaces. They currently run two major social media hubs, the first direct2dell, is a blog and community site focusing on connecting Dell’s internal workings with its customers. As well as talking about new releases and it often features very senior Dell managers talking about the direction of the company and looking for opinions from their customers.
This type of deep engagement and communication whilst possible in the big networks is much more difficult and cumbersome.
As well as operating a blog community network, Dell also runs IdeaStorm - one of the best social media spaces run by any brand. Its purpose is to allow anybody to suggest ways for Dell to make improvements and let the community vote on how good those ideas are. This doesn’t just include make your computers cheaper.
Since its inception, IdeaStorm has had nearly 12,500 ideas submitted, received nearly 700,000 votes on ideas by the community, and has put 355 into operation.
Could this have been done on Facebook? Maybe.
Should it have been done on Facebook? No.
By creating their own platform, and drawing an audience to it, Dell ensures that they are the facilitator of the conversation about their brand and products. Whilst the networks are great for generating awareness, people crave the ability to share their passion, or interest in a site dedicated to supporting it.
So, brands need to stop burying their hands in the sand or dipping their toes in the water. Lots of people are talking and lots of others are looking to see whether brands are involved or not.
The crux of the issue is...
Do you want to let people discuss your products, services and company with no sight, insight or interaction with them?
Or
Would you rather build your own community and honestly interact with them to help grow your brand and business?
