Branding and social media, Part 2: Brand experience, the stronger animal
Posted on 29. May, 2010 by Kelly Hobkirk in Branding, Personal Branding.
Brands are designed to connect with people in direct and meaningful ways. The experience of connecting is among the most powerful ways your business can start a long-term relationship with people. Social media, on the other hand, is made to create indirect experiences.
Why rely on the weaker animal? Try as you might, you cannot dictate which social media tools your audience will use. Sure, you can guess that facebook and twitter might be among them, but who’s to say that your interaction on those platforms will reap the rewards you seek?
I shudder just a little when I read that social media provides a new level of interaction between a business and its customers. Why? Because it doesn’t – Well, perhaps it does sometimes, but by and large the value of the interaction has degraded to gutter churn. The feedback companies receive via social media channels is weaker and arguably less accurate than anything they received before social media existed. Turning that weaker feedback into valuable data can easily be likened to polishing a turd.
Before social media, you could get a consensus of valuable opinions and relevant feedback by surveying actual customers on a daily basis — in fact, it provided a great opportunity to have a real conversation, but now with social media, similar feedback is garbled at best and wildly inaccurate at its worst. Now, instead of surveying actual customers, companies are taking in opinions not only from customers, but also from non-customers, competitors, planted reviews, opinionated people with too much time on their hands, people with superiority complexes, and even people who would never in a million years buy their product.
When you use inaccurate data to fuel your branding and marketing efforts, you net a wasted budget and meager results. It undermines your confidence to boot. When you can rely on real, accurate information, you can enter into your marketing with greater confidence, stay true to your brand, and expect a higher ROI for your efforts.
The biggest difference between social media and real marketing
Social media gives companies another way to procrastinate from real marketing. Social media profiles are not nearly as powerful as your brand. They consistently lack the critical types of interaction that form strong brands. With branding, we create a real, truthful dialog about you and your business, then you bring it to life when people experience the true essence of your brand.
With social media, people often create an image, which is really little more than a forgery of who you are. Companies hire consultants to create their profiles, which are frequently not true to their core characteristics. The question is not, “How can you try to relate to facebook users?” The real question is, “Which part of our brand is relevant for the channel?” I read some profiles and wonder who do they think they’re fooling? And why? Social media is supposed to be about creating a real dialog, not an image, a fake, a forgery. Fake elements undermine your brand instead of enhancing it.
Brand elements are designed to create a meaningful experience. Social media is designed to create online (indirect) interaction. A meaningful brand experience is more successful in creating a hot prospect, or in essence, in connecting with real people. Experience is real, and nothing can replace it.
To read about how to create social media profiles that are consistent with your brand, check out: 5 Steps to branding your social media profiles.
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