Tag: scale

  • Brands and consumer social influence

    Sometime back, I had read a post on Inquisitr very interestingly titled “Let’s bring some reality to this social media game“. Although my expectation of reality was slightly different from what the post delivered, I still found it a good read because it dealt with an issue that I have thought about several times. We even discussed it in the comments section of a post that (among other things) brought up the Kiruba-Cleartrip incident from last year.  In my personal blog, I’d written about the ‘clique friendly web‘ in a tangential context – of bloggers with fan clubs perhaps losing objectivity and not tolerating a difference of opinion. The question, meanwhile, is really quite simple – should companies on social media sites give differential treatment to customers basis their ‘social influence’.

    A few weeks back, I saw a post on Jeremiah’s blog which dealt with the same subject. His point – “Just as companies factor in value of a customers celebrity status, buying power or customer loyalty –companies must factor in social influence or put themselves at risk.” He has even created a matrix that shows 4 phases of  incorporating social influence and the pros and cons of each phase. He has factored in both absolute and relative influence (influence in context of a brand/company’s domain)

    Let me try a context for this. Very simplistically put, I’ve always seen the consumer generated media as part of a media long tail. The traditional media is in the head, aggregators including Google, FB, Twitter are also there now, followed by forums/discussion boards, influential blogs and then the individual accounts. So consider this perspective. Brands have always given preferential treatment to MSM simply because they reach a mass. And let’s just say not just in terms of using them for communication, but the overall experience for their representatives. With the rise of the web and a new set of aggregators gaining prominence, brands have tried to evolve processes for the system – from SEO/M to blogger outreach to presence on Social Media. Yes, processes do help, but..

    With search engines including real time updates in their results – Google even outlines how its Twitter algorithm works, brands now not only have to listen, but also work out the way to handle all the messages being thrown at them, because they’d be deemed unresponsive otherwise. The phrase “there’s no dipping your toe in social media” comes to mind. So, should there be differential treatment?

    At this point, I know most companies would do exactly that, but I wonder if they’d then be just trading one set of media for another. I’ve seen many cases where a tweet from a relatively unknown (in my circles) person gets RTed and becomes a raging fire. It is perhaps easier to assign a process basis categories of social influence, but I think, unlike the structured media that has been dominant before, this is a web – of human connections, which is  more difficult to fathom, and have ways of inorganic spread that are no way close to measurement, yet. If indeed, there is a process to be set up, perhaps it should be more internal than external – involving different functional groups capable of thinking and reacting to specific domains and contexts. With services like Twitter planning on multiple identities within the same handle, perhaps the old fundamental social media approach of people to people might help debunk what I am also inclined to believe – “socializing cannot scale“

    until next time, weighing scales 🙂

    PS: If I consider posts on both blogs, this one happens to be #1000 🙂

  • Sizing up

    Quite sometime back, Chris Brogan had written a small post on ‘Small is a weapon’ with its many advantages like the ability to experiment more and respond faster (than big companies).  Before going further, let me clarify that this is a broad generic view, and I’m sure there might be large companies that manage all this. But perhaps smaller companies have a better chance. The comments on the post reinforced these advantages – internally, a flat structure that makes effective decision making easier, a willingness to change, the importance given to ideas, and externally, faster turnaround for customer issues, a personal touch, and so on. These characteristics struck me as very important ones from the perspective of social media interactions.

    Is social media a better tool in the hands of small companies? In a small organisation, would the qualitative metrics of social media be appreciated much more? Would the community – external and internal be connected because of the passion they share for what they’re building together? An idea, (via dina) which binds the audience?

    As organisations become bigger, ideas become products/services and then become brands?  And as brands grow in stature, does this size dictate everything else? Is that why mass media seems appealing? Because somewhere along the line brands picked up larger audiences and found that one way communication to this audience was easier? Does the focus of the brand move on to marketing communication, monetisation of the audience etc, because the  brand cements itself in terms of its attributes and perceptions in the mind of people and all it wants to do then is reinforce?

    Can larger organisations handle the expectations of social media users – both from an internal perspective (empowerment, for example) as well as from a customer standpoint – (speed, personal touch, conversation). Do they feel limited by  the number of interactions that can be handled? Are they too used to conveying the single brand message irrespective of context, and do they find ‘scalable intimacy‘ difficult to handle? Do they then try to dictate the kind of ‘official’ use that their employees find for social media? After reading Mashable’s post on a similar topic, I had another thought – would an international brand be able to make sure the cultural differences and sensibilities across geographies are handled in the right manner always, in a medium that’s not limited by geography?

    Perhaps the solution is to move back from the narrow confines of the brand’s architecture to the original generic idea space, because there will be the old audience with new experiences who can help the brand connect with a new audience? New ideas would emerge leading to a new lifecycle?

    I guess its not quite easy to answer since the phenomenon of social media has been making its presence felt only recently, and its difficult to figure out organisations that have been using it for a long time and also scaled up at the same time. Meanwhile, McKinsey Quarterly has a great read on 6 ways to make web 2.0 work. (for companies)

    until next time, scale the walls