By mapping out different customer journeys, we can better understand the experience of our social ecosystem from the consumer’s perspective; compounding the effects of any single campaign or message.  The true power of social media comes from the complete integration with two things:

The entirety of our other marketing – Communicating a consistent message across all touchpoints will only expound the message to ensure brand awareness, understanding, and expectations within the marketplace.

The day to day lifestyle of our customers – Understanding where, how, and why our consumers communicate, then communicating with them on their terms, taking them to the most relevant information for them as a customer or prospect will create a sense of trust and understanding between the customer and the brand.

Creating a holistic and a granular view of our customer journeys in the digital space, we can better serve our customers by providing more relevant information as well as better plan our marketing strategies to increase ROI in the digital space.

Courtesy of Flickr - JulianBleecker

While reading a recent interview with Social Media Guru Erin Byrne, something that seemed insignificant caught my eye and has really taken over my thoughts over the past 24 hours. The two opening questions alluded to a new way that we as marketers need to think about how we communicate with our individual customers:

What do you see as the biggest changes in the communications landscape in the last five years?
The most significant change is the change to a many-to-many dialogue. Companies can no longer have one-way conversations with stakeholders. To truly be effective, you have to create dialogue and larger conversations. At the same time, companies should stop trying to control their messages and must focus on real-time branding.

Define “real-time branding.”
Real-time branding is the ability to leverage social tools to react and respond to stakeholders individually-with the right message for the right person at the right time. But it’s important to note that, while people talk about online, online, online, it’s really about integration. Conversations go online, then offline, then online again. The most successful PR professionals use traditional PR to build awareness and then use social media relations and digital tools to drive from awareness to action.

Amazing, right? There are a few things I wanted to bring to further light and discuss in more detail:

“The most significant change is the change to a many-to-many dialogue”
An amazing revolution brought on by the Web 2.0 technologies and the communities that have been forming in the social realm. Everyone now has a voice if they want one; each and every customer, advocate, and cynic. We now have to provide relevant content for, not only the masses, but also each individual. The only way to do this is “create dialogue(s) and larger conversations.”

“Real-time branding is the ability to leverage social tools to react and respond to stakeholders individually-with the right message for the right person at the right time.”
Using social technologies, we can not only communicate individually with the right person, at the right time, with the right message, but we can also communicate in the right space. Not all of our customers are going to be on Twitter and Facebook, but we can still use some of the marketing technologies we have at hand to build and continue individual conversations.

Social Ecosystem

To build a Real-Time Brand and to fulfill these needs of continuous individual conversations, we have to create a Social Ecosystem. Gone are the days of putting up a corporate site and hope our customers find it. We now need to focus on multi platform, social conversations, real-time search, mobile strategies, CRM or Database Marketing, customer service techniques, infiltrating mass advertising with social aspects (ie QR codes, augmented reality, etc) and so on. Designing this type of conversation strategy and providing relevant information to the individuals participating within our social ecosystem will allow the user to take what is meaningful to them and build a personal conversation with our brand, on their terms, with their preferred communication methods. This type of Social Ecosystem creates, what I call, a malleable brand.

Malleable Brand

By giving the customer the power in the conversation, allowing them to take content and information (rather than having it pushed on to them) will create a level of trust and understanding that traditional marketing could only imagine. Knowing where, how, and why to communicate with customers on their level is the future of what’s to come; creating an even larger definition of Real-Time Branding.

Conclusion

I am a huge advocate of communicating to individuals through marketing. With increases in technologies like Social CRM, database marketing, QR codes and social slimming, we have all the capabilities to become relevant in an individual’s world. By creating and understanding the social ecosystem around each individual, we can build this malleable brand that provides highly relevant content and processes that the consumer can mold into their own personal lifestyle, increasing trust, advocacy and passion.

With this passion, our customers will begin to proudly “wear” our brands as badges and utilize our brand essence to define a certain aspect of their own personality… the pinnacle of any brand.