Many brands now see the need to engage in Social Media. For those brands already engaged, involvement varies from industry-to-industry e.g. technology companies tend to be heavily involved, retail less so. But across industries brands tend to fall into one of four types, characterised by their levels of engagement and commitment, as neatly summarised in the recent ENGAGEMENTdb report:
- Mavens, brands like Starbucks and Dell who are heavily engaged across many social networks, and see social media as ‘core to their go-to-market strategy’.
- Butterflies, aspiring Mavens, butterflies are involved in a number of networks but, lacking the investment or buy-in to engage fully in ‘multi-way conversations’, tend to spread themselves too thin e.g. American Express and Hyundai.
- Selectives, though not participating in as many channels as Mavens, Selectives are more focused than Butterflies and focus on depth of engagement with customers where it matters most e.g. H&M and Phillips.
- Wallflowers, involved in just a few networks and only lightly engaged, Wallflowers are cautious of the risks and uncertain of the benefits e.g. McDonalds.
Though the jury is still out, the report points to a “financial correlation between those who are deeply engaged and those who outperform their peers”, with Mavens and Selectives coming out top. However, what is certain is that, beyond the important and still developing discussion about Social Media ROI, smart brands such as Starbucks and Coca-Cola already get the fact that Social Media is part of deepening the relationship with people who enjoy what it is the brand has to offer. They understand that engagement is core to shifting brand preference and perception, and that social media is not a ‘direct-response play’ (i.e. specific and quantifiable).
Understandably, it is sometimes hard for businesses to come to terms with this, versed as they are in the ways of ‘push/interrupt’ type communication, which is largely based on control and measuring return. Social Media is much more about relinquishing control and facing the fact that you may not currently be able to understand/measure precisely, if indeed at all, the causal relations between engagement and behaviour – you just have to ride the wave.
I recently took the chance to discuss some of these thoughts with Antony Mayfield, SVP Social Media – Global, at iCrossing and author of the eBook ‘Brands in Networks’. Antony borrows a phrase from Kevin Kelly when he talks about Social Media being “the edge of an expanding machine”, the machine in this case being the Internet. I think this is a particularly apt analogy that helps to illustrate both the way our lives have become ‘digitised’, and also the rapidity of the change. ‘The edge’ also seems to represent the beginning of, as Antony puts it, “people learning to use the media – en masse”. More and more people are becoming involved in this mass learning process. Movement up the participation ladder is rapid, and brands are being swept along much like the rest of us. This is incredibly disruptive, and poses a significant strategic challenge for businesses who are struggling, either culturally of organisationally, to adapt to the rate of change.
So what can brands aspiring to become Selectives or Mavens do to help make sense of the situation? Following Mayfield’s three fundamentals of brands in networks is not a bad place to start:
- Know your networks – where are they? Who is in them? And how do they work? Take time to identify and understand the relevant networks and the written and unwritten rules of engagement.
- Be useful – what would the networked community find useful, and what could your brand’s participation add to the network? Be careful to listen to cues and criticism from the community, and to think about doing things with and not to its members.
- Be live in your networks – things move fast, so the only way to ensure that you understand what is going on in your networks, to keep up your prominence and maintain your usefulness is to stay keep listening and to continually stay involved.
And what about measurement? Social Media analytics are an emerging art/science and we need to continue to develop our approach to understanding networks. But we need to be careful that in doing so we don’t feed a ‘fantasy of control’ that has us believe that measuring activity at a micro level somehow enables us to understand and predict what will happen at the network level (I like what strategist and blogger Richard Stacy has to say on this matter.) In the meantime brands just need to keep taking an active role in their networks, listening to the conversations taking place, measuring what they can and trusting in instinct.