Branding via social media sites

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Question – what can social media sites do for my branding activities?

Answer – social media sites work on the principle that friends talk to friends, friends buy on other friends’ recommendations, and that friends buy from friends. Face-to-face social networking has always been a critical means of publicising yourself and doing business. Internet social media sites simply offer you the potential of much bigger numbers. The drawback is that the story can get away from you, or even turn around and bite you, but as Oscar Wilde once said “There is only one thing worse than being talked about – not being talked about”

Key points

The growth of the Internet has revolutionised much of marketing communications practice, none more so than its introduction of UGC – user-generated content – whereby ‘ordinary people’ share their thoughts with other ‘ordinary people’.

Except that some of these people are not so ordinary – they are rabid networkers of the sort identified by Malcolm Gladwell in ‘The Tipping Point’ (and his more recent ’Outliers’ is highly relevant too) . Feed some juicy gossip to one of these people and there is the potential for a communications explosion around the world. All they needed was the mechanism.

Blogging is one route. Some bloggers have massive followings. Social media sites are another and especially at this moment YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace of the mass market sites. There are then a plethora of specialised sites based on any number of niche communities of interest (e.g. LinkedIn and ecademy for business people), and the software from people like Elgg will allow you to set up your own social media site in a matter of hours.

In more detail ….

YouTube

YouTube is the social media phenomenon as seen on TV or, more likely, as TV is seen on it.

Its operations are extremely dubious with regard to intellectual property law, but Google who own it seem to be getting away with any number of copyright infringements.

At one level it is a great place to dump any movie files you happen to have to hand and wish to share with others at no extra cost. At another level, it is a new type of search engine - the biggest in the social marketing space. For any interest you may have, there is a great likelihood that there is a movie you can watch about it.

Even if you only have PowerPoint presentations to share, one swipe through Microsoft’s Movie Maker and you are on YouTube.

It is therefore massively attractive to marketers because you can ‘re-purpose’ any amount of content via YouTube, hosting it there for free, and trying to drive traffic towards it. If you are a major brand owner, your TV ads can become instantly infectious in a viral sense. If you are a DIY player, you can generate movies for the cost of only your own time and share them with whomever you like.

For still photographs, the equivalent site is Flickr.

Twitter

Twitter is a conception of genius with its own set of catch terms built around ‘Twitter-‘ or ‘Tweet-’ and 'Tweep-'.

Like most social media sites it is based on people profiling themselves and then developing networks of other people to talk to.

The unusual aspect of it is that you can only type a very short message to your ‘friends’, so that the outcome is a titles roll of announcements which disappear from your screen typically within less than half-an-hour as they are replaced by later Tweets.

Having said that, there are ever-increasing numbers of Twitter applications to allow you to do a lot more with the site like search previous Tweets, automatically generate ‘friends’ etc..

Our guess is that it is aimed ultimately at replacing more conventional electronic PR methodologies and will shortly offer premium paid services related to business communications, such as advertising and PR blasts. The issue for all social media sites is to monetise them – get the traffic first and then the cash.

Currently, when you join up, you get hundreds of people contacting you offering either techniques to generate thousands of Twitter friends or MLM opportunities, but no doubt the conversation will progress and mature.

Facebook

Facebook is the social media site of the social media sites – it is about people talking to people from and into their private leisure space. You share photographs and videos, links and thoughts.

Marketing opportunities are numerous but you must understand that this is primarily a leisure space, and overt commercialism is penalised ultimately by instant dismissal (not a big deal – you simply give yourself a new persona and off you go again).

One way of communicating your brand is to buy pay-per-click ads along the Google model, at about a third of the Google price. You can target these ads using segmentation categories compiled by FB from member profiles.

Another way is to join a Facebook group site or to set up your own. These group sites can often reach tens of thousands of people and are built around a specific community of interest (which could be your own).

Another opportunity is to develop a Facebook application which can then whizz its way around the Net.

MySpace

MySpace was the Facebook before Facebook but now seems to be niching towards entertainment and especially music where its music streaming functionality is particularly attractive for showcasing your latest tunes. It also runs advertising and applications, but we suspect that will end up in a slot next door to Apple/iTunes (or even inside it).

Digg

There are a number of sites which are part social media sites and part news aggregators, of which Digg is probably the most significant, with StumbleUpon somewhere behind it.

The methodology behind them is that as you trawl the Internet you mark content that is of particular interest to you whereupon it turns up in these news aggregators ranked by popularity and categorised by searchable key words.

In other words, it is another alternative PR technology.

We can help you in two ways - we have a mass of smart strategic brand marketing tools, processes and workshop techniques for you to use, and a mass of smart brand marketing agencies as members across the world with niche knowledge and experience to support you thereafter.

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