Browsing Tag

Social Media

The Connected Consumer: How Social Media Has Changed Retail

Facebook-Logo1.15 billion people use Facebook. Half of those users have made checking Facebook part of their regular morning routine, with nearly a third logging on before they get out of bed in the morning.

Social media has become central to our customers’ lives. Our customers put tremendous time and energy into constructing their social personas—their digital presentation of their idealized self—through Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram photos, and more. They’re also extremely responsive to the information being shared by their friends.

Through technology, the average person has an ability to connect with people and organizations on a scale that was unfathomable a generation ago. It’s time we talk about what this change means to our customers, especially in terms of their purchasing decisions.

Technology Changes, People Remain the Same

When you walk down the street, pay attention to how many people are “plugged in”—their focus on a smartphone screen, almost completely oblivious to the physical world around them. This behavior may seen to be a relatively new phenomenon, but it has its roots deeply planted in mankind’s history. As long as there have been people, we have been driven to communicate with each other. We have an innate need to connect.

Maslow first articulated how important it was for humankind to belong to a group of like-minded individuals. The drive to belong to a community is one of the strongest motivating forces shaping human behavior. We make all kinds of decisions—what types of clothes to wear, what entertainment we enjoy, where we go to school, even who we consider a suitable romantic partner—based in large part on how it will strengthen our connection to our communities of choice.

This is a very biological aspect of our being. Stress levels drop off, with lower blood pressure, less gastrointestinal distress, and fewer associated complaints in environments where people feel like they belong. These environments can exist online or off: our customers see the two interchangeably.

Examining Your Customers’ Idealized Selves

When we look at our customers on Facebook, it’s important to understand that the information they choose to post and share, from photos of their vacation to their favorite music, movies, and books, is an elaborate communicative dance designed to signal to all viewers essential elements of that individual’s idealized identity.  Our customers put a tremendous amount of time developing their social media presence, and they pay a lot of attention to the information their friends are sharing.

Social media has become a driver of demand. As Brand Managers, we need to understand what communities our customers belong to, and watch those communities to identify emerging trends. The conversations that occur on social media don’t necessarily tell us who our customers are—they tell us who our customers want to be.  This is a critical understanding for the brand who wants to put customers first.

Be A Better Brand Manager: The Essentials

  • Social media is a platform for your customers to present their idealized self. Look to social media to discover not who your customers are, but who they want to be.
  • All customers are motivated by the need to find a community where they belong and are valued.
  • Social media has become a driver of demand, as customers seek out items they’ve seen members of their community of choice post about.
August 20, 2013 by

You Can Get There From Here: L.L. Bean’s Sure Footed Approach To Social Media

L.L. Bean has been very successful in the mail order business for one hundred years. Founder (and namesake!) Leon Leonwood Bean would be proud — and probably absolutely dumbfounded by the latest role the familiar catalog has taken on in the marketing and promotion of his business.

Earlier this month, Liz Pride, who hails from Leon’s neck of the woods, took the L.L. Bean catalog and used it as the basis of her creative endeavor, a quirky Tumblr called “Your LL Bean Boyfriend.” On the site, Pride pairs images from the catalog with short snippets of copy that could have come directly from the pages of your favorite romance novel.

For example:

Nathan quietly opened the door and brought in a tray with a bowl of chicken soup over to me. “Let’s kick that cold you have,” he said, “I know how much you want to go skiing next weekend.”

The combination has been in a hit. In a little over a week, Pride has collected over 7,000 followers, including the L.L. Bean team.  Carolyn Beem, a spokesperson for the sportswear and outdoor gear retailer, told AdWeek, “We’re just going to watch it like everybody else,” she says. “We think that it’s a load of fun. It’s well written, and it’s funny.”

L.L. Bean has done more than watch the popular Tumblr. They’ve even participated, adding their own comment to the site: Elizabeth- we at LLB are loving this. Most of us never thought of LLB and sexy in the same sentence. It is the talk of the office!

A Humanistic Approach To Social Media: Joining The Conversation, Not Controlling It

We have to applaud L.L. Bean for skillfully navigating one of the emerging challenges of social media: the brand-centric conversation in which the brand itself is not the driving nor primary voice. If Clay Shirkey’s right about the cultural and social changes we can expect to see in an environment of cognitive surplus (Not familiar? Watch Clay’s TED Talk on the topic here!) there will undoubtedly be more and more of these types of creative projects being developed by Brand Lovers.

The challenge we have as brand managers is complex. Becoming aware of conversations, assessing them, and determine what role, if any, we have in their progress, is not a process that we, as an industry, have articulated particularly well to date. It is unsettling for leaders who believe they have the ultimate control over what their brand is all about to discover that that’s not true at all: it is customers who build brands, not brand managers and marketing departments.

If one were to speculate on the reason’s L.L. Bean’s leadership believed that their customers chose them before any other brand, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the values of high quality merchandise, rugged outdoor aesthetic and trustworthiness (backed by an almost legendary guarantee) would rank very high on this list. What Liz Pride’s work is doing is revealing another layer of psychological associations Brand Lovers have with L.L. Bean. In Liz’s world, the L.L. Bean customer is sexy, caring, and nurturing. It’s an expansion of L.L. Bean’s key marketing message that evidently has great appeal and the brand didn’t have to lift a finger to benefit from it. The fact that they did, engaging in the conversation in good faith and with good humor, has further endeared the company to those drawn in by the hunky models and romantic prose.

The tenets of Brand Modeling remind us that listening to the customer, completely and on a number of levels, is the route to success. LL. Bean, by abandoning the all-to-common typically litigious, controlling response to creative endeavors with a more humanistic, welcoming, and responsive approach, has gained access to new insights about what their customers value most about their brand. We’re sure they’re going to capitalize on those insights.

Your organization can do the same thing if you’ve got the vision and courage to commit to putting customers first.

January 29, 2013 by

Is Social Media History? The Story of Us, In 140 Characters or Less

“Quickly getting addicted to her Blackberry! Help!”

That brief blast from the past was featured in the Huffington Post’s article, Oldtweets Shows You Twitter Posts From 2006 That You’d NEVER See Today. It’s joined by 19 other tiny tales, each remarkably dated, discussing everything from what a great movie Snakes on a Plane was to pondering how anyone named Barack Hussein Obama could become President of the United States of America.

While the article’s good for a few laughs (some of which, it must be admitted, you’ll have to explain to the younger interns) there’s more value to be found in the questions it raises. Social media’s fast pace and global reach have a tendency to obscure the very real role platforms like Facebook and Twitter have in both recording our collective history and shaping our future.

The Exchange of Ideas

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, discusses how humanity is unique in one critical way.  Unlike any other species on the planet, we become more prosperous as we become more populous.  This is just not true for the rest of the animal world.  Too many individuals tends to lead to catastrophic events, like over-consumption of resources that results in massive die offs.  Humanity, however, seems to have sidestepped at least some of these consequences. That’s not to say we live in a perfect world, where no one suffers. However, the rates of suffering are significantly less than one would expect, minus one critical factor.

According to Ridley, the reason humanity thrives is because we’re adept at exchanging ideas. Individuals talk with each other, and through this conversation, each benefits, adapting what they’ve learned to best suit their own circumstances.  The ability to exchange information allows people to specialize and work collaboratively with others who have different specializations to perform feats of creation no one individual could do alone.

What we’re seeing happen now, on social media platforms, is the escalation of the exchange of ideas to a speed never before possible in human history.  We’re also seeing unprecedented feats of creative collaboration being used for everything from simple entertainment to social commentary to sweeping cultural change.

The exchange of ideas shapes everyone involved. Participants in the exchange, the audience to the exchange, and a tertiary level of people who may never even know the initial exchange happened, but find themselves facing a social or cultural environment suddenly different as new ideas become part of the collective understanding of what it means to be a human being on this planet right now.

Social Media and the Role of Branding

As brand managers, we need to be  aware of the fact that these conversations are happening, and what role we take within them. Some brands are the equivalent of thought leaders, steering and shaping the conversations that surround them. Other brands are more passive, reacting to conversations they witness. That’s bad, frankly, but even worse are those organizations that remain almost willfully oblivious to the fact that these exchanges and resulting cultural changes are even happening. When these brands proceed as if the world they’ve always known has remained unchanged, they inevitably find themselves in the middle of social media firestorms.

It takes a certain amount of courage and faith in one’s leadership ability to look at your brand and assess, with objective eyes, how well you’re functioning in the current social media environment. Will your brand be tomorrow’s throwaway “ha-ha, remember when?” joke, or will you be central to the current conversation, participating in and benefiting from the exchange of ideas?

October 11, 2012 by

Putting the Social in Social Media: Focus on What’s Fun

Over 60% of the world’s population is active on one or more forms of social media.  You’ve got to wonder what that’s about.  Why are people so focused on Facebook, so tethered to Twitter?

On one level, this is an easy question to answer. We can talk about the fundamental imperative that drives human beings to communicate with each other. Talking is what people do: communicating with each other allows us to make smarter decisions, enjoy a higher quality of life, and attain goals more efficiently and effectively. The propensity to engage in conversation is one of the defining characteristics of humanity. Social media provides a vehicle where we can talk with more people, at greater distances, at a speed never before imaginable in all of human existence.Given the serious benefits that communication offers, it’s no wonder that social media has become such a phenomenon.

Yet while communication offers serious benefits, not all communication is serious.  In fact, some of the most powerful conversations — those that offer real rewards in terms of establishing and strengthening relationships — are pretty funny.

There’s a reason for this. According to Karyn Buxman, author and former president of the American Association for Therapeutic Humor, humor is a social lubricant. People enjoy laughing (for both social and biomechanical reasons) and seek out opportunities where they can enjoy humor. We’re a savvy species, and have long ago figured this out. From the class clown who cuts up to get attention from his peers to the landscape full of funny billboards, humanity has a history of leveraging laughter to fill social and entrepreneurial needs.

This can work really well on social media. Take, for example, this Twitter exchange between Oreo and AMC Movie Theaters.

It began with a simple musing from the Oreo team, about the time honored tradition of sneaking food into the movie theater. AMC responded, and before you know it, thousands of people were watching the two brands swapping comments. It’s important to consider is the humorous, pseudo-combative framing of the exchange. A bantering exchange between two brands presents both in a good light. The Twitter stream with its air of  friendly competitiveness and obvious awareness of current pop-culture tropes imbues both Oreo and AMC with a sense of identifiable humanity.

Focusing on the fun is a smart move on social media. People are retweeting the exchange and following along in part because they want to see who can be funnier. Who will win the witty exchange? It is a mini-event, the type of moment that makes social media enjoyable for the end user.

Remember too that social media users can gain some measure of social standing by being the first to discover or share a funny post, video, or exchange with their peers. Every person who forwarded these Tweets was feeding the essential human hunger for gossip.

If we think about gossip as the act of gathering together in intimate groups to enjoy the same stories in common with other, it’s easy to see how social media’s ability to filter audiences into select small groups is so appealing. The person who can, with a few quick clicks, determine who gets to see the funny material and who is left out of the laughs is fulfilling, albeit likely unconsciously, the need to dominate, to be in charge, to decide. There can be deep water under even the most shallow boat.

It’ll be interesting to see where the exchange grows.  Perhaps it will grow to an epic size, becoming part of both brand’s legacy. Perhaps a Pro-Oreo group will grow up behind the sneak cookies into the theater idea, while fans of AMC can unite to defend the tradition of stereotypically high priced movie snacks. Perhaps it will all just fade away, destined to be nothing more than a Tweet memory.

No matter what, both brands won by becoming more humanistic and approachable in the eyes of their customers. That’s the secret to relevance on social media.

October 1, 2012 by

Are You Ready For Some Football?

The 2012 Football Season has finally started, bringing joy to the hearts of fans everywhere—at least as long as their teams are doing well.  While there’s lots of action to watch on the gridiron, you’re going to want to pay special attention to social media this season.  The NFL, its teams, and even individual players are proving to be surprisingly adept at using Facebook and Twitter to strengthen the relationship they have with their fan base.

Social Media From The Sidelines

In Customers First we talk about one central concept: the better you understand your customer, the more completely you’ll be able to meet and surpass their expectations. This is the recipe for fanatical brand loyalty.

The NFL hasn’t always demonstrated a concrete understanding of what their fans want the most—witness the most recent frustrating lockouts—but they seem to have gotten a handle on things as far as social media is concerned.  They’re using their Facebook presence to give all of the Monday Morning quarterbacks a platform to share their opinions and be heard, posing to their fans the very same questions that are normally discussed by James Brown, Boomer Esiason, Dan Marino, and the rest of The NFL Today crew during halftime.  A post asking which of five rookie quarterbacks starting this Sunday would be the most successful drew over 2,700 responses. While there’s no doubt that the fans admire the athletes on the field, it seems that the behavior they most identify with and emulate with is that of the commentators.

Adweek has given the NY Giants a glowing review of their social media efforts, and we think you should pay particular attention to the bit at the end, which discusses how the sales of tickets and Giants memorabilia is being integrated successful into the social media content mix. Translating online activity into real world revenue works best when the conversions are not forced, but occur naturally and organically. The Giants present a wide range of content, including images of the locker room before the game, exclusive game photographs and post-game live chats with team personnel.

A comprehensive narrative is built, delivering a powerful emotional dividend of anticipation, excitement, and (in the case of the season opener against the Cowboys) heartbreak. It’s a complete experience. Sales solicitations to watch the game again or purchase tickets for the next game mesh seamlessly into the mix. Putting the customer first—providing the information and emotional experience they’re seeking—strengthens the relationship in such a way that they’re predisposed to do more business with the Giants.

An Effective Social Media Presence

When we talk about individual players having an effective social media presence, we’re really talking about the power of the intersection of two powerful unconscious forces: archetypal images and the cultural narrative.  Sports stars and celebrities attain a quasi-mythical status through media exposure. Some of the commentary surrounding Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady would lead one to expect that the man could change water into wine in between throwing touchdown passes. This puts them in a unique position where they are both more and less than they actually are.  Some of their actual humanity becomes obscured by celebrity’s glare; at the same time, they become powerful symbols of skill and perseverance. The ups and downs of a professional football career track neatly against some powerful cultural narratives, such as the hero’s journey, in which a pure heart and determination can prevail over even the most unjust fate.

Put it all together, and you get Peyton Manning. After many, many years of loyal service to the Indianapolis Colts, Manning was laid low by a neck injury that sidelined him for a season. His team let him go, and today, the elder Manning is the quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Manning’s Facebook page addresses the situation with humor (there’s a great image of Steeler’s coach Mike Tomlin saying “What do you mean, his neck is fine?”) and language that frames this period in Manning’s career as a new chapter in an exciting narrative.  Fans aren’t just tuning in to see the game: they’re seeing Manning’s return and his triumph over circumstances. What happens when fate deals a good guy a bad hand? No one knows for sure, but they’re using social media to make predictions none the less.

Not everyone can throw a perfect spiral pass. Few people can take a hit from a linebacker and get up again. It’s pretty hard to kick a football forty yards through the uprights. But what we can do, as marketers, is take the lessons the NFL is teaching about the effective use of social media and apply them to our own online conversations. Be prepared for touchdowns!

September 20, 2012 by

Social Media and the Power of Public Knowledge

We’re starting to hear the rumbles, here and there, from businesses of every type and every size. Social media, the marketing tool that was supposed to deliver amazing results, doesn’t seem to work very well for some companies. They say effort invested isn’t providing anything much in the way of meaningful results.

The first response seems to be platform flight. Facing Facebook failure, organizations decide to move on. They decide to focus on Twitter, and if that doesn’t pan out, they move onto Pinterest, perhaps, or Instagram.  It’s the digital equivalent of the African Savanna, where the herds are traveling ever onward, perpetually in search of a water hole that will quench their burning thirst.

It’s not a bad strategy, if you’re an elephant.

If, however, you are a company that wants to build meaningful relationships with your customers in a profitable and enduring fashion, it’s a disaster.

So what’s going wrong here?  It’s a simple problem. We’re focusing too much attention on the media aspect of social media, and not nearly enough on the social end of the equation.

Understanding Social Media: The Power of Public Knowledge

Let’s start this whole conversation by saying this: it’s not Facebook’s fault you’re not connecting with your customers. It’s not Twitter’s fault, nor Pinterest’s fault, nor even Instagram’s fault. All of these social media platforms do exactly what they say they’re going to do: provide a fairly easy-to-use way to share your content easily with anyone who wants to listen to it.  If nobody’s listening, it’s not the communications vehicle that’s the problem. It’s the message.

In other words, don’t blame the radio if nobody dances when your band’s song plays. The people have proven that they’re willing to dance — if the music has the right beat. When a song comes on that they like, they dance.

If you want to use social media effectively as a marketing tool, you have to understand, on a fundamental, humanistic level, what causes people to participate in online conversations. Why does someone join Facebook in the first place? What drives them to post their thoughts and feelings? What encourages them to like a company page, to comment on that page, and to share the content they see there with others?

Steven Pinker has some great answers. We encourage you to watch this video — it’ll take about 10 minutes of your life, but it’s 10 minutes that will make you a better marketer. Of particular interest is the bit on public knowledge.  It starts at about minute 8.

Watch that, and then think about the Arab Spring revolutions that rocked the Middle East. Pinker points out that it’s the phenomenon of public knowledge that sparks community action. What we learned from the Arab Spring is that social media is an ideal vehicle for creating public knowledge.

Knowing that someone else has the same knowledge you do, and is experiencing similar emotions as a result of that knowledge, is an extremely empowering and motivating experience. Dominant organizations have learned the lessons of Arab Spring, strategically using their social media presence to create the experience of public knowledge within their target audience.

Harley Davidson is doing this on Facebook with their Harley Davidson Worldride Campaign. Go to their page and check it out. During a two-day event, where Harley riders are “taking over the world,” fans are encouraged to log in and share how many miles they’ve ridden. So far, the results have been astronomical — the total miles would bring you to the moon and back!

This is public knowledge in action. Riders are sharing their distances, true, but they’re also sharing their experiences. They want to tell what a good time they’ve had. Hearing about other people’s good times on the bike motivates those who haven’t gone riding lately to get the hog fired up so they too can participate. Even the people who can’t go are logging in to share their support, explain why they can’t participate, and offer encouragement to those who are riding.

Real world activity can, with the proper, strategic encouragement, drive social media activity, which in turn can drive real world activity. That’s the power of public knowledge. It transforms governments, it builds brands, and it is the only thing that’s been proven to change the world. If your organization isn’t tapping into the power of public knowledge now is a good time to start. Give it a shot before you give up on your latest social media endeavor. You’ll be glad you did.

June 26, 2012 by

GM’s Shifting Social Media Strategy: Is Dropping Facebook Ads a Smart Move?

The news that GM has decided to stop using paid Facebook advertising has created a big buzz. If the nation’s third largest advertiser isn’t getting enough bang for their buck from Facebook ads, the conversation goes, what does that mean for the rest of us?

GM reportedly spends approximately $40 million on Facebook. 75% of that investment is devoted to monitoring and maintaining GM’s Facebook presence, through the organization’s Facebook page. The remaining 25%, $10 million dollars, was going toward paid advertising.

Coming days before Facebook’s IPO, this announcement has left many people wondering if the social networking site’s financial model has a fatal flaw. Revenue projections based on increasing revenue from advertising may not bear fruit if dominant organizations—or those organizations that look to dominant organizations as a guide to their own marketing strategies—decide that the advertising on Facebook just isn’t worth it.

Should other organizations follow GM’s lead? Should Facebook advertising be abandoned? Should organizations focus exclusive on direct engagement with users on the organization’s Facebook page? Do those efforts even pay off, or will we see GM eventually pulling back from their $30 million dollar commitment?

Customers First: Brand Modeling to Make Smart Social Media Choices

If you read Customers First (or even one of our earlier books, like The Power of Cult Branding) you’ll see that successful companies gain their dominant market position by focusing intensely and exclusively on understanding their best customers. Developing a comprehensive, holistic view of who a brand’s customers are, with a special focus on the unconscious psychological factors that motivate their decision making, makes it possible to predict, with a high degree of certainty,  a patterns of customer preferences.

Knowing these preferences makes it easier for marketers to create marketing that will really resonate with their customers. It also helps them identify the best mix of marketing vehicles for their brand.  We call the process of identifying those preferences and deriving actionable information Brand Modeling. Put the right message in the right place is the first rule of marketing.

Customers aren’t shy.  They’ll happily tell you what they think about almost anything you ask, especially if you have established a relationship where your customers feel actively engaged with your brand. That’s why we think GM is making a really smart decision with their commitment to a content-heavy, high-touch approach to Facebook engagement.

To fully realize the potential of social media, it’s essential to focus on listening as much as—even more than—you talk. One of the best ways to develop a deeper understanding of your customer base is to listen to what people say when they tell you about themselves.  To do this in the most efficient manner, it helps to be equipped with the analytical tools necessary to derive meaning from conversation.

GM used their Facebook page to survey their fans directly about their Facebook usage and preferences. The data revealed from that conversation surely played a critical role in the decision to pull the plug on Facebook advertising.

Today, it’s the company that listens closely to its best customers’ wants and needs that wins. For GM, that means dropping Facebook advertising. For another organization, it may mean a more enthusiastic embrace of Facebook advertising. Your Brand Model will help you make the right choices for your organization. That’s the power of putting Customers First.

May 22, 2012 by