Social Media: Lose some brand control or lose your customers
The killer tip for 2008 on how to embrace social media to manage brand reputation and drive sales is genius in its simplicity. Get your PR agency to pretend to be bloggers. Ask them to blog in a positive and “wacky” way about your brand. Then you’ll “get down with the kids” and you’ll enjoy complete control. Or maybe not!
The fake blog, “flog”, now seems quite absurd but of course it really wasn’t that long ago that Wal-Mart notoriously tried to do precisely this. Their PR agency Edelman pretended to be independent bloggers “Wal-Marting” across America, in a Camper Van, sleeping free in Wal-Mart car parks…and got exposed. Not a good way to promote your brand in the hypersensitive blogosphere. But I’m not having a go at Wal-Mart, merely highlighting that what seems crazy now was until relatively recently seen as a “goer”. In fact even though many retailers have and will make mistakes, they will eventually make social media work for them or more accurately will work effectively with social media. They just have to.
Here to stay
Social media, whether you’re talking blogs, vlogs, photo/video-sharing sites or social networks, is here to stay. Forget about the technology for a second. Social media taps into the essence of most people: a burning desire to connect with other people, to share with them their views and experiences in an engaging way. Technological developments on the web has massively improved the reach and thereby the power of individual self-expression. That’s why 10 million people in the UK, and 250 million worldwide belong to social networks. That’s why there are over 110 million blogs monitored by Technorati. And that’s why people are spending 12 hours a week online, up one hour on a year ago, with 16 to 24 year olds age group increasingly logging on rather than watching television. The question, then, is how should retail brands interact in the social media playground? Is the objective reputation management? Or is it increasing transactions, most obviously online? The answer is both.
Technology is key
Technology is making conversations much easier between brands and customers and more importantly for conversations between consumers about brands. Monitoring software allows marketers to track brand conversations – be they in blogs, on social network pages or on forums – and respond appropriately as well as see trends. This helps develop brands in the social media spaces and also can play a part in achieving the M word, monetization.
There’s much debate about the extent to which social media sites can be monetized. Sceptics see much hype and overvaluation. Maurice Levy, Publicis chairman, was not a lonely voice when he labelled Microsoft’s $240m investment in Facebook as “insane”. In the other corner we have Rupert Murdoch confidently expecting a $300 million profit for his MySpace business in 2008. The debate will continue but don’t overlook the huge amounts of traffic, and by extension revenue, being generated by social sites for online retailers already. Traffic to retail sites is still predominantly driven by search at 34.7% search as reported by Hitwise.
However, social networks, hardly registering a couple of years ago, are now at 7.66% edging ahead of email generated traffic. In fact there has been a 153% increase in retail traffic from social networks alone since last Christmas. Hitwise also state that Facebook is now the 4th most visited site in the UK after Google, eBay and Windows Live Hotmail. There are several routes brands can look at to drive traffic and monetise social media. The most conventional one is display advertising. Most household brands are already running ads on the major social media sites. MySpace has over 80% of the Fortune 500 running campaigns. Many RSS feeds are now including banners at the tail. Over 100,000 brand pages were created on day one of the Facebook Ads roll-out.
Despite this take-up, and undoubted future opportunities to improve targeting of ads according to user interests and conversations, spectacular results are far from guaranteed. These ads are running alongside conversations and interactions. Crucially, they’re not part of it. Maybe this is why, anecdotally at least, average conversion and clickthrough rates for brands on social networks are not as high as hoped. For example, ad network Blue Lithium maintain that user-generated content sites and social networks were less effective for advertisers, by around 30%, compared to more conventional sites.
Branded communities
Another increasingly common play amongst brands, including retailers, is to create their own social media infrastructures such as social network communities. The lure of control is tempting yet in essence it’s a “build it and they will come” approach, it’s expensive and it’s tricky to pull off. Let’s turn again to Wal-Mart who in 2006 built their own social network site, The Hub. Having seen that 3% of their traffic was from MySpace they wanted to get further control of their teenage market. It flopped and closed after ten weeks. But are others also trying to re-invent the wheel? In the US eBay recently pioneered their Neighborhoods Social Network programme. HMV in the UK are doing the same.
Other brands that have recently launched their own social networks include Coca-Cola, Dr Martens, Saga and even Kylie. Some may work but only, surely, if they try to work with and integrate with existing social networks. The eBay neighbourhood users are surely naturals for interacting in a community but why the isolationist approach? As Erik of Techcrunch put it, “What would really be smart would be if eBay allowed anyone to easily take any module on a neighborhood page—the reviews, the visual product search, the discussions, or the eBay blog posts—and embed them on other web pages like Facebook, MySpace, or their blogs…”
Working with communities, understanding the mindsets and making it easy to share are all key to success. In retail your target customers in social settings are receptive. They want to enjoy themselves - even if it is ranting. Embrace the participation. If there is a forum or blog criticising your brand, say your customer service, then assess the validity and level of influence and respond or at least decide not to respond. What’s true in a call centre is true online: a disgruntled customer can become an advocate almost immediately if treated right. The difference in online is that the positive response ripples out far and wide.
A further challenge is to give customers the ingredients to engage with and maybe actually promote your brand. Create widgets and applets that users find useful, like, love even, so much so that they will download and crucially share with their friends. Similarly videos showing products you sell at their coolest get shared and competitions asking users to create their own videos can work. But if your brand doesn’t suit the popular sites or mechanisms then don’t force it. Work with what’s out there, sure, but think about your customers in the long term. Build on their passions, don’t preach. It’s about creating meaningful, truthful and ongoing conversations with your customers. It means losing a little control but gaining a lot of brand champions and ultimately sales.
Matt Brocklehurst, Head of Marketing, Latitude Group, IMRG Annual Report 2008.