You Brand

I just read Seth Godin’s great post Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law and I hope that brands will do the same. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that, due to the size of our neocortex, the number of people with whom we can have social relationships is limited. As Seth Godin put it “One hundred fifty people in the tribe”.

There are 2 very valuable lessons for brands in this:

Empower your organisation. There is no way that 1 social media manager alone (which is the wrong job title anyway) can have social relationships with hundreds of thousands, may be even millions, of customers, let alone potential customers.

Make sure to do your research well. Find your most fervent 150 brand advocates out there and empower them.

Numerous reasons have been put forward recently as to why brands are slow in embracing social media: productivity concerns, security concerns, lack of adequate metrics etc. But ‘who’ is thinking that? Corporate management in most companies is still a man’s world. Could that be the real reason?

Numerous surveys have shown that women are more social than men. They favor building relations, whereas men love to broadcast. As a logical consequence they outnumber men in social networks.

Would more women in corporate management facilitate an authentic corporate engagement with consumers in social media and elsewhere? Would more women in corporate management enable the necessary restoration of trust?

The population in the Western world is almost evenly distributed, meaning that there are as many female consumers as there are male consumers. Of course this varies depending on the product category. Looking at the car industry where I used to work, one could argue that 50% of the cars are bought by women and the other 50% are bought to impress women! In other words, the influence of the female consumer is much higher than the gender ratio would suggest.

One more reason for brands to reassess their hiring practices.

What do you think?

‘Father knows best’ was a very successful US sitcom in the 50s. As the name suggests, moms were moms, kids were kids and father knew best. It reflected the paternalistic attitude that fathers – the kings of the respective castles – were wiser than mothers and kids. This empowered fathers to make decisions on their behalf, presumably for their own good. It resulted in the authority of the powerful over the less powerful, responsibility was not shared. Communication relied on commands and instructions rather than on conversation.

Many brands still have that attitude today: Consumers are consumers and brands know best. Social media have effectively proven that brands don’t know best, which is why many brands have a problem. They have to change their attitude, not just apply some new tools and technologies.

‘Father knows best’ was successful in the 50s and 60s. Times have changed dramatically since then. Brands are well advised to realize that. Prisoners of the past will not win their freedom in the future.

Who knows best?

For starters, social media are, at least according to the traditional definition, not a medium. Wikipedia defines media in communication as the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data – clearly social ‘media’ is more than that.

Social ‘media’ is still experiencing staggering growth rates with people from all over the world joining. Are all of these people active users ? Of course not. According to Forrester there are ‘authors’, ‘critics’, ‘collectors’, ‘members’, ‘viewers’ and ‘inactives’. Admittedly the number of ‘inactives’ is decreasing and the other groups are growing.

Social ‘media’ are not popular for one single reason. Some people are looking to add value and share insights, they are the new leaders. Many are happy to follow and consume what is being offered. They were driven to join by curiosity and a need of belonging. This is normal. Just because hammers are available for everybody, doesn’t mean that we all go out to get nails!

Social ‘media’ are, at least partly, a ‘gift economy’, where goods and services (recommendations, information, insights, news etc.) are shared for free – reciprocal altruism if you will. That is noteworthy and causes brands, living in market economies, headaches.

Social ‘media’ must have more self-proclaimed experts/mavens/specialists/gurus per user than any other medium worldwide. Despite that, many brands are still struggling to develop a business model that works for them and the users in social ‘media’. The traditional marketing-aspirin doesn’t work, the headaches mentioned above become worse.

Social ‘media’ are here to stay. It is imperative to develop a model that adds value for consumers and brands, because they are interdependent. Is it possible to combine the benefits of a gift economy with those of a market economy? Exciting question.

May be not such an ironic look after all – what do you think?

Guest post by Jennifer Leggio

viaSocial media consultants: A call to action.

Many brands think that due to the relevance of social media, they need a strategy to deal with it. I personally don’t think that this is the solution.

Brands and their on- and offline-activities are under constant observation by interested consumers, who inform a global audience via the social web about everything they see and hear. Containment strategies don’t work for anymore. In this connected world the credibility of brands depends, more than ever, on consistency across all channels globally. A brand promise made in one country is expected to be kept everywhere. If not, somebody somewhere will blow the whistle.

The social web and the availability of free and credible information from multiple sources have led consumers to become more sophisticated and less ‘obedient’. Integrating them in the architecture of value creation would therefore be a smart move for brands. This changes their business model with implications for all divisions of a company: R&D, production, HR, finance, purchasing, sales and of course marketing.

New rules, new and old participants with different roles and new judges have led to a new game for the brand, which requires a new overall brand strategy, rather than ‘just’ a social media strategy.

What’s your strategic assessment?