The online world has changed quite dramatically in the past 5 years. It has grown from a single track, bull-horn and a soapbox world, to a conversation. The advent of YouTube, Flickr, Friendster, and Myspace we’re all predictable. People like taking videos, photos, and talking to each other. These first wave social networks paved the way. Flickr and YouTube were purchased by Yahoo and Google and have been smart enough to integrate and open their api’s. This was been the key to their early success. Recently, an argument could be made that Twitter has been so successful because it’s api is so accessible (I’ll start writing this article).
The success of new/social media has happened because people like sharing content with their friends and family. They like talking about their lives or their friends lives or watching other peoples lives. It’s no surprise that these online worlds became fodder for college kids to share the previous nights keg stands and bong hit pictures with each other, as younger generations are quicker to adapt to new technologies. It’s no surprise that these things became popular, very quickly.
Some things have surprised me. Twitter has surprised me, immensely. It makes total sense when you look at it now. The world is so connected, and so eager for information and human dialog. It was genius to build a service that makes it so easy to write short 140 character. It was genius to create a service that was so open and available, that most any developer could build an application to use it. They recognized that if a service that only allowed 140 character posts was ever going to succeed, it was going to need a lot of entry points.
What’s also surprising to me is that brands of all kinds have been able to get into this world and participate too. These days, you can’t just build a website and hope for everyone to visit. If you want to make an impact online, you must go to where your users are. I would guess that most of the time, your users aren’t on your flash powered microsite. I’m sorry. It’s probably really neat, probably has a lot of nice graphics, and probably cost a lot of money. Truth be told, they probably aren’t visiting your site every day. You know what sites they are visiting? Ask your kid in college, and it’s probably the same: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Myspace, and every other site that you think are just for college students.
So, what does this mean?
Grab the account names of every major social media service named for your brand. You’ll thank yourself someday when you want to start using it. You’ll also thank yourself when you don’t have to spend time trying to get the account name back. Believe me, I’ve done that. Luckily, my employer causes people to move a little faster than most mom and pop shops.
Don’t listen to some social media experts saying you should ‘personalize’ the account more, and grab an account named to a person. Unless you’re already a celebrity or are very able at gaining notoriety, nobody is going to notice you. I’m sorry, you’re just not that popular. I’ve built the biggest corporate brick and mortar twitter account and on average, 5 people visit my blog on a daily basis. I’m certain that I know all of them.
Don’t listen to the best advice of your PR department. They’ll come around eventually. It’ll be best if you ignore them for a little while. Most of them equate targeting demographics with mass produced magazines or tv shows. For the most part, they do an awesome job getting your story out to these demographics. This would have been their entire job 2 years ago. Not anymore. Driving a good narrative online is as important as getting the soccer moms who watch the Today show. Eventually they’ll come to you with a big problem asking for advice and guidance on ways to solve it with the ‘internets’. Leverage your existing accounts, buy some google adwords, tell them to do a video … Basically, follow the Obama Campaign’s crisis strategy.
Speaking of, the Barack Obama campaign built one of the best brands online, ever. If you were connected online, and somewhat inclined to voting, you saw them somewhere. They recognized that you need to not only build a compelling online experience on your own servers, but you must also go to where your users are. Create a compelling experience across your spaces, and syndicate content. Target your users when they least expect it. I distinctly remember getting a text message from the Obama campaign in the summer of 08 asking me to text my zip code to get localized responses. I was talking to a republican coworker when I received it. I told him immediately, “this guy is going to win,” I had never got such questions via text message, and I’m loyal to certain companies who could ask me such questions. Now political campaigns aren’t exactly the same as big corporations, but there are plenty of lesson to be learned from them.
The next article will deal with how to converse over these networks, without making an ass of yourself (and possibly winning people over).
I totally second the author’s thoughts. The social media has given socializing an entirely new face. You can “meet and chat” with your near and dear ones who are probably 1000s of miles away and never feel the distance hampering the emotional connectivity.
Corporates need to reach out to the target audience through the media, but the use of the social media for political campaigns has given a different meaning to the “power crusade”.
Obama has indeed revolutionized the concept of Personal Branding through the internet. I just read an article that talks about how he went about using the most widely used media – the Internet, to “market” himself in the most innovative manner. Have a look at it: http://www.socialpeel.com/2009/01/21/3-mindblowing-online-tactics-that-took-obama-to-the-white-house/