Category: Social Media

  • Mean better than average?

    BBH Labs offered some excellent perspective in a post titled ‘Mean Brands‘ a few days ago, which pointed out that when brands are asked to be more human online, we overlook the fact that humans are not nice online. Expanding on this, they showcased three scenarios – brand vs consumer, brand vs brand and brand vs organisation – with examples, and asked whether this was a good strategy to build stronger brand allegiance.

    I was reminded of something I had tweeted earlier this year when Cleartrip was at the receiving end of some good old fashioned twitter outrage when putting an abrasive and stupid (non) customer in his place. I was convinced after going through the preceding tweets that Cleartrip had tried their hand at explanation before getting exasperated and reacting with sarcasm, just like a human. It was bold, but more importantly it also showed character and conviction.

    Even as brands are trying to be human, humans are becoming (or are trying to become) brands. When they do get an audience, an increased sense of self-importance is inevitable. Most of the time, objectivity is minimal and the thrill of shaming/trolling a brand is too tempting. So perhaps a level playing field is only fair. Of course, it is always more fun when the knockout punch is delivered with a solid punchline. Richard Neill’s comedic rant and Bodyform’s hilarious response is an example. A few more here. (via @sunnysurya)

    until next time, brands mean business!

  • Transmedia and popular culture

    Last week, I chanced upon Coldplay’s latest comic-video. It’s apparently a prequel to a six-part comic which can be pre-ordered at the Coldplay Store. There’s also a live concert happening soon. I thought there was real potential here for some transmedia work – they already have a music video, comics and live concerts – with Facebook, Twitter and other digital properties it could have been a great mix.

    But what I was really wondering about is how pop culture can be used by brands for building transmedia narratives. Comic books, music bands, television programming etc, and user generated content on social media can be a potent mix. When I have thought about transmedia (and written about it) it has always been with the brand as a driver. But what if the lead is taken by a pop culture phenomenon and the brand, understanding a commonality, tag on. In-movie promotions are probably a crude example I can think of.

    The typical way brands handle it is by trying to push their messaging, and in the process destroy the pop culture phenomenon’s attraction. But if they find partners who have a connection, spend some thought on it, and help in advancing the narrative without forcing it in a selfish direction, they might actually get a completely different audience to become interested. A step further is in taking the help of the audience themselves to forward the narrative.

    In many posts, I have mentioned that organisations need to find their purpose and then  nurture employees who can identify with it. Perhaps the above is an inorganic way of doing the same on the consumer side.

    until next time,  to be continued 😉

  • The Things that FB Connect Us

    Facebook’s ad film, released last week, reminds me of its redesigns – I hear it getting dissed across the web, starting with the place I saw it first. (check the comments) In case you really haven’t seen it yet, here it is

    The film is titled “The Things That Connect Us”, it uses real world objects – chairs, bridges, doorbells, dance floors, nations and so on – as analogies of how Facebook connects us, and suggests in the end that perhaps we make these things to remind us that we are not alone.

    I have read perspectives on how some of the ‘metaphors’ are not universal enough, and that this ‘connect’ idea has been used by several brands already. At 1 billion monthly active users, I wonder if Facebook really needs a positioning statement and if this film was supposed to be that. It is different things to different people but at its base, it connects us. The film is not meant to acquire users, or retain them. There are other things that Facebook does that will achieve these ends more efficiently and effectively. It’s when marketers see it through the prism of a campaign or advertising that it seems a #fail.

    So why did I like the ad? A couple of lines from the AdAge article (linked to earlier) are pointers – “Great brands don’t talk about themselves, they talk about what they really love.“, attributed to David Kennedy, and “The best marketing that we have is people coming to Facebook every day connecting with their friends, families, local business, but every once in a while we’re going to want to define for ourselves who we are and share our values…” from Facebook’s own consumer marketing head.

    The first statement is about a purpose that the organisation has found for itself – the things it loves to do as an organisation. (A few quotes here would give a sense of what Zuck’s aspirations are) Call me naive, but it’s a compelling purpose that has the potential to go beyond business and profits and one that many people would love to work on because they can identify with it. That defines brand Facebook, and purpose is what the best of brands strive for. The second sheds light on the audience it is intended for – themselves primarily, and then users who can share their values.

    So then, why not show it in their internal network, you might ask. Probably because they’re Facebook, sharing is in their DNA, like it or not. 🙂

    until next time, share a like (or a dislike)

    PS: In case you didn’t like it, you might like this parody 🙂

  • Data.Information.Knowledge.Wisdom

    I still remember a time when most social media presentations considered the “One Size doesn’t fit all” slide mandatory. The platforms were new, and brands/practitioners were told that aping was not really the best policy. Yes, there were best practices to learn from, courtesy early adopters, but there were many factors to be considered before they could even be adapted, let alone, cloned.

    I still subscribe to that. Every organisation’s business objectives are different, even if they appear to compete in the same category and fight for the attention of the same audience. This difference could most likely stem from their different visions – from how they would scale over time, geography and even their business domain to the nuances in consumer tastes they want to target. This difference would then translate into how they conduct their business – internally and externally – how much hiring gets done in what function, what and how much of marketing is done, how customer care and operations works, what products and features are shipped first and how, to name a few.

    These would then dictate what the organisation’s metrics are, and how and when they are measured. Considering that social media is the most ‘direct contact’ and ‘mass’ set of platforms, these differences are arguably exaggerated, because audiences can be sliced thinner (compared to traditional media) and some organisations might deliberately do things to keep out certain audiences eg. what they communicate and how and where too.

    Why a repeat of these known perspectives? With more and more data being created by the activities of brands on social platforms, we are seeing tools that are trying to convert all this into usable information. Sometimes these tools are in human form too, and they bring their own perspectives (or lack of it) which essentially means comparison of apples and oranges just because they are fruits. I saw an example last week, which also included the brand I work on – Myntra. To quote Pico Iyer “Where once information had seemed the first step to knowledge, and then to wisdom, now it sometimes seemed their deepest enemy.” Goes for the step before too – data.

    Take a couple of examples – Facebook Page and Post Likes. Thanks to the subtle way in which Sponsored Stories/Page Post Ads work, it’s extremely difficult for any tool to bifurcate organic and inorganic Likes. (I am excluding the Page Admins of course) And yet, comparative analyses are made on Like growths. Or take Engagement – semantic analysis is at such an early stage that many tools would consider 100 comments on a post dissing the brand as high engagement. And yet, ‘insights’ are delivered on Engagement. Uff, engagement! My thoughts on that mother word have been documented earlier. These are operations mind you, I am not even getting started on strategy.

    Does that mean you should not consider this data/information- competitive or not – at all? Of course not! But how you use that is where knowledge and wisdom step in. Like the famous saying goes, “Knowledge is knowing the tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Sadly, the way information is being used, oranges would soon be passe, apples would be compared to tomatoes because they are both fruits and are red in colour.

    until next time, data diarrhea

  • Too big to fail

    I had a bit of an epiphany a few days back. A sign of the needle shifting from social to media. In the era when the two words were grudgingly stuck together, one of the catchphrases I’d heard was ‘fail fast, learn fast, fix fast’. It was a time when the rules hadn’t been made, and experimentation was the only way to learn. Though this practice had its share of critics, there was hardly any choice.

    But now there is. Facebook has an entire suite of offerings now – it’s no longer vanilla display ads, there are Sponsored stories, Page Post Targeting, Offers, to name a few  – all meant for specific purposes. They even have case studies put together over a period of time. (we – Myntra – were featured a while back too)

    So, the epiphany? In a conversation, I realised that things were more serious now. Brands are now loath to experiment since the general feeling was that a lot of people would see it and it would affect the brand image. It’s not just ads, posts, but even social actions! Smelled like traditional media. Is that good or bad? I don’t know, but I do know it’s evolution.

    until next time, traditional social 😉