After writing the post below, I started to ask myself the question 'why do brands struggle with social media?' The answer to this could take many paths, but the simple answer in my head is that brands are not people. Brands are owned by companies, and companies have P&L accounts and shareholders. Yes people work for them, but the brands themselves are not human.
Anyone that studied economics will remember Milton Friedman stating that "the social responsibility of business is to increase profits". In short, it is not to be social. This is why we often hear about companies entering the social media space and getting it wrong. They approach social media as any other media, pushing messages that essentially interupt what we are doing with "buy my product, I am awesome" style messages. In a social space this is unklikley to be viewed as social, and more likely to be just annoying.
The fact is that the brands that do have success in Social media are the ones that have realised it needs to be used as a branding tool, not a sales tool. In the words of Faris, another old colleague of ours, you need to be nice or leave. The rules of normal marketing don't apply to social media. If you are asking people to be your friends at the same time as you are asking for money, you break the rules of social interaction that we all live by.
So, what do you do then?
Just because a brand is not a person, it doesn't mean it can't be in a 'social' space. You just need to remember some of the basic rules of friendship and social interaction:
- Don't sell and ask to be friends at the same time
- If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested (listen to them)
- Respond - if people are talking 'to you' in blogs, on Twitter and more, it is rude not to talk back
- Be honest - if you are not you'll be found out and suffer for it
- Start conversations, don't just listen to them - be interesting, useful and/or entertaining
- Friendship requires a commitment - you need to be in it for the long term
If you think about any of the brands you have interacted with socially, I bet they tick some or all of the points above.
- Sam
