Social Media Best Practice

In June we’re running a workshop for ISBA members on ‘Maximising and evaluating your social media opportunities’ (you can book here). We thought that this article might help to explain some of the background to why and how brands can use social media. We originally wrote the article for The World Advertising Research Council as an introductory explanation and it appeared in the January edition of it’s journal, Admap. It is re-published here with their kind permission.

Too often when we think of social media what comes to mind are corporate blogs that never get updated and that awful, inevitable moment when your boss asks you to ‘take a look at this MySpace thing’ she’s been hearing so much about. There’s a lot of social media dross out there, but in the last couple of years it has become clear that the opportunities social media present far exceed the lame stereotype of half-heartedly giving your brand a Facebook account which no-one ever visits or spending a small fortune on a video which you hope goes “viral” even though nobody can tell it’s about your company and your products. Social media activities, done well, can vastly improve your brand’s marketing, research, customer service, and communications.

“Social media”, broadly speaking, refers to all those activities, platforms and practices that enable users to create, modify and share knowledge, opinions and content. Those ‘users’ are you, your co-workers and – most importantly – your customers. The platforms are myriad: blogs (of course), networking tools like Facebook and LinkedIn, video sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo, dedicated discussion spaces and message boards like Mumsnet and FootballForums, exercises in collective intelligence like Wikipedia and Digg, aggregated news like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast (a client of ours), fundraising campaigns at Just Giving and Red to Blue, and crowdsourced recommendations for your next purchase or rental at Amazon or Netflix. In each case, brands and customers come together to create content and share it with stakeholders and friends.

Social media presents a number of opportunities for your brand. Well executed social media activities can be an excellent way of marketing your brand to potential and existing consumers. For example, new digital content distribution platforms Joost and last.fm use informal, regularly updated blogs to promote their new projects and products, whilst establishing a friendly, human voice for their brands. Social media is an ideal way to foster ongoing, mutually beneficial relationships with your customers, as with the discussions on the “Apple Developer” forums, or the Doritos competition in which a consumer-created commercial was chosen by other consumers to air during the Superbowl.

The platforms that those relationships are built on can be powerful tools when launching new products, as British singer Sandi Thom showed by giving free online concerts via MySpace before releasing her album. Social media can be equally useful when dealing with emergent crises relating to your brand. JetBlue’s CEO David Neeleman garnered much praise for promptly issuing a mea culpa video on Youtube after his airline left thousands stranded in 2007, and toy manufacturers Hasbro dodged a bullet by carefully monitoring Amazon reviews of their products, learning that one of their products was potentially dangerous.  Social media activities are can also be of benefit within your company, enabling internal communications and supporting research and development projects by providing a real-time space for conversation, idea-swapping, and debate.

Marketing has always been about a process of exchange. The power of social media is that it enables your customers to be an even more active, involved part of that exchange: it lets them dictate the terms of the conversation. It’s your job as a brand to fuel that conversation, to keep it going, as the producers of popular TV shows such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica do. Between televised seasons, Lost augment their broadcast products by providing its fans with branded interactive games and puzzles, ensuring that viewer interest remains at fever pitch even when the show is not on the air. And when the Sci-Fi Channel saw that fans were producing amateur videos of Battlestar Galactica, they didn’t sue for ‘cease and desist’, but made professional logos, FX, and music available, and turned the phenomenon into a competition. Keeping conversations about your brand going in the way means talking to the right people in the right social spaces, and becoming knowledgeable about the subjects they’re interested in, just like the scissors brand Fiskars did by creating a popular online space for consumers to talk about arts and crafts. The result is marketing that is not just more accurately targeted, but which is actually welcomed.  When marketing is welcomed, people tend to pass it on to other like-minded folk, as the extraordinary fund-raising efforts of MyBarackObama.com prove. Thus the other great strength of social media: it encourages word-of-mouth marketing of your brand. In an environment in which your potential customers trust the recommendations of friends far more than those from the mass media, good word-of-mouth buzz about your brand can be invaluable. The producers of Cloverfield fostered great word-of-mouth by drip-feeding mysterious clips onto YouTube prior to the movie’s release date which then spawned that greatest of all accolades;  their own spoofs. Other brands seek out consumer advocates to spread word-of-mouth, whether its to post reviews on Amazon, or to share exclusive content with their friends.

To ensure that your social media activities on these platforms are successful, it is helpful to bear in mind the KUDOS acronym (more here). All your social media activities should revolve around a piece of Knowledge which is Useful, Desirable, Open and Shareable. The Knowledge could be any piece of content relating to your brand, from dynamic, up-to-date, information about flight times, as with Travelocity’s updates, to financial tips, as Halifax bank does with its ‘Share Price Alert’ service. It could be podcasts with your product development crew, as in the case of General Electric’s series on the brand’s emerging technologies, or the sort of branded content seen in BMW’s The Hire videos or (more modestly) in TripAdvisor’s ‘Cities I’ve Visited’ Facebook widget. These pieces of Knowledge should always be Useful to your audience. This is not simply a case of ensuring they get the best price for a hotel room. It also means helping them understand changes you’ve made to your products – as Sky Movies did so well by explaining some changes in their channels on an online forum, assuaging the anger and confusion of their customers. Equally, your social media activities should be Desirable to your audience. So music recommendations from Mufin can keep them ahead of the trend, exclusive webcasts let them chat with their favourite authors, and discussion forums can let them demonstrate their own expertise in topics from computing to cookery. Social media activities should also always be Open about where the useful and desirable knowledge is coming from. Failure to disclose conflicts of interest never works well in the social media world, as Whole Foods CEO John Mackey found out when he used a pseudonym to badly disparage a rival brand. Your activities should also be Open to being altered, also. This can be as simple encouraging consumers to leave comments on a blog post (and always responding to them!), or the more complicated algorithmic ratings system for movie review scores at IMDB. Finally, any social media activity should be Shareable – your customers must be able to pass it on, either through their preferred networking site or aggregator (Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. etc.) or just through word of mouth.