Courtesy of Flickr - limaoscarjuliet

In yesterdays article, “Clorox Seeking Attorney to Oversee Social-Media Programs,” Jack Neff discusses the move by Clorox to hire a full time attorney to monitor the company’s social media space. In a groundbreaking move, the industry has now shifted from dabbling in social media to accepting it as a viable communication platform. The duties of this new found position are to “are to clear and procure intellectual property rights regarding production and distribution of advertising, including Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Recording Artists issues, consumer privacy and video licensing.” Neff also mentioned the importance of monitoring the employee participation in the space in regards to the newly formed FTC rules.

I personally believe that social media should be left to the consumers… provide content, live the brand message, and let the consumer mold the brand into their own personal life. However, I see a great use for this type of social media attorney. The legal ramifications that have plagued corporations in our “sue-happy” culture have created a mask of fear that needs to be alleviated in such an open environment as social media. There are few brands out there participating in the social space, most of which have high legal constraints to what they can do in the space, including long lead times for content, canned responses, and highly monitored content, taking away from the “real-time” essence of social media. So, having a legal counsel focusing full time in the social space could alleviate some of these potential pitfalls in the building and harnessing the power of the personal relationships.

As more and more companies follow suit with Clorox, we need to ensure we don’t turn these platforms into another “push marketing” channel and kill the true essence of what’s happening. We need to keep in mind, that relationships take continuous, real time interaction with little to no barriers. Too much legal restriction and enforcement could defect consumers rather than embracing.

What are your thoughts on the issue?

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.

In yesterday’s  AdWeek article “’09′s Most Talked-About Brand: Microsoft” Elaine Wong ranks the most talked about brands for 2009. An amazing list with a very close client of VML and mine, Microsoft leading the way. However, the information and methodology that was described is what drew my attention more than the content. Simply by looking at the graph below, we can see many different things. We not only get a list of the most talked about brands, but we can also see the number of posts and articles written about the respective brand, the positive tonality about the discussions online (positive discussions v. negative), and the Buzz ranking of each company. It’s simply a great use of brand monitoring tools (ie. Spiral16, Radian6, VML’s SEER) for data collection and utilization.

Courtesy of AdWeek

After reading the article and seeing the data, I began to wonder what this list might have looked like 5 years ago. So, after a quick Bing search, I found an article called “2005 Reader’s Choice Awards” on BrandChannel, which ranks the most popular brands for 2005.  As you can see from the list below, there are some similarities in the brands list, but the amount of detail about each brand and the methodologies behind the information is what I was looking for. The rankings below were based on over 2500 global participants who were polled online with various questions about the most popular brands. While this type of methodology has worked for years and years, there are a couple flaws in this strategy.

Courtesy of BrandChannel

While comparing the 2009 and 2005 lists we can identify two major characteristics that have increased the probability of correctness and enhanced the amount of information.  They are:

• Type of Respondents: There is a good chance that the respondents to the polling strategy in the 2005 ranking are not a direct depiction of the total marketplace. Whereas, in the 2009 ranking, we are using “real” conversations and discussions happening already online utilizing brand monitoring tools. This type of information mimics real life conversations and is a better description of the total marketplace opinion and sentiment towards a brand.
• Where Conversations Are Truly Happening: In the 2005 ranking, we are asking respondents to go to a site to vote or capture people’s votes when on a particular site. The information gained from this could be skewed through the speed at which the respondents answer the polls or the types of people that visit these sites, as mentioned above. However, in the 2009 ranking, we are simply monitoring the actual conversations that already happening, without requiring any respondents to answer any polls. This strategy captures truer information and produces more relevant results.

Comparing these two rankings, we see a great movement in the quality of information as well as the amount of data that we can capture. The discussions and conversations that are now happening online are closely mimicking real life only, in the online world, it’s trackable. With brand monitoring tools, we can monitor these real life conversations, with little to no influence on our parts.

Takeaway

Using brand monitoring tools, we can take a snapshot of what is happening in the online world. We can get a better understanding of the sentiment towards our company, products, brands, etc. as well as our competition and industry. This “real life” data gives us a better understanding of the wants and needs or our customers, without any influence from us. With this information, we can create a better social strategy and engage with our customers correctly in the social sphere. So, instead of using the now archaic strategies of polling respondents to gather information, why not monitor the crowd with one of the many brand monitoring tools available today?

Image from luc legay - Flickr

With the InterWebs becoming more and more of a living, breathing social web, I often see companies jumping on the different platforms with the thought of “dipping a toe” in the social space with no real reason or strategy. This type of engagement could have worked a year ago, with the social sphere barely taking shape, but not these days where real time isn’t fast enough and mistakes are seen as personal attacks to the individuals participating on social media. If you’re a late-comer to the social world or want to enhance your strategy, follow these simple steps for better engagement and results.

Narrowly define the different segments of your market: Talking with a narrowed segment allows for more personal conversations rather than the mass approach of saying something and hoping a small percentage says something back. The closer we get to the individual, the more we engage those individuals.

Listen: Identify where these different segments “hang out”online. Create a communication map of where the particular segments spend most of their time online (is it Facebook, blogs, Twitter, etc?). While doing this we need to not only listen to what is being said, we need to focus on how they are saying it. Jumping into a conversation with the incorrect nomenclature could be as devastating as not participating at all.

Develop a conversation strategy: With the targets and platforms identified, we can now develop a conversation strategy within the particular segments on their particular communication platform of choice. Know what you will say, how you will say it, where you will say it, and how often you’ll say something.

Engage: This is a no brainer. Nobody, not you not your customers, wants to be talked to… They want to be talked with. They want to feel like they are an individual with individual wants and needs; creating an individual conversation.

Track/Monitor: The great thing and the bad thing about a social strategy is the ability to track and monitor. Continually look at the social web to see where others are talking and understand the dynamics of your customer’s behavior online. You can then start to realize the social ROI, engagement levels, how effective your conversation strategy is.  By developing your conversation strategy, you now have a benchmark to compare the reality of your social successes or failures to.

Evaluate/Adapt: The most important thing about your social strategy is your ability to adapt. Facebook and Twitter may not always be around. Developing a “conversation” rather than exploiting a platform is the only way to succeed in the social web. Adapting to the ever-changing space will become the leading factor of success moving forward on the social web.

Don’t just jump in… jump in with a reason, with a strategy for continued social success.