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Mr and Mrs Marketeer: how difficult is your job if your brand is…well…not sexy?

Forrester analyst, Josh Bernoff, writing on Groundswell reckons that anyone in marketing responsible for “boring brands” is really earning their keep, as “you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about”.

Having worked in B2B public relations for more than a decade, I can testify to the sector having more than its fair share of companies that the world at large may call “boring”. It’s a totally subjective problem; where cable ties and ball bearings may be as effective as counting sheep to some, they are rock and roll personifed to someone else.

But back to Bernoff and the challenge of making the “boring” interesting…

Believe it or not, he sees social media as a thoroughly relevant way of bringing brands - that you wouldn’t automatically think of as social - to life.  

The point is, talking about your brand or company may be inherently dull to the customer, but talking about their problems isn’t. Bernoff calls this “borrowed relevance” - generating talk about things your audience really cares about. And the examples he cites show how coming at your company’s marketing from a lateral point of view (our sister company, TBWA Manchester, would call it “disruptive”) can achieve something that has significance for the customer and banishes the boring tag.

Especially with B2B organisations - where their overall customer base is unlikely to be on the same scale as consumer brands -creating a buzz about what you do and making it relevant to the people who matter is essential. And social media is another way of finding those people, keeping them interested and relishing just how beautifully boring your business is. 

It sounds like something the speech-impeded Elmer Fud might say, but - in fact - it belongs to The Guardian, as writer Emily Bell shares with us in today’s 25th anniversary edition of Media Guardian.

Apparently, it’s what the Guardian’s head of social media has come up with to describe the necessary approach to digital that the traditional media must take - rather than the tried and trusted journalistic tactic of focusing on exclusivity.

As Bell says, the Guardian’s “twattergy” is to “positively encourage people to use [these] social platforms [Twitter, Facebook, YouTube] in the most effective ways possible”.

And that’s not a bad approach for any organisation which believes that people with an interest in it might be searching it out on the internet. But relying on the corporate website of old - static, closed, communicating in one direction, i.e., at you - is no longer enough and will more likely do your business a disservice in the socially connected world of the today’s world wide web.

Take Twitter: a major retailer we’ve been working with recently had made a humble start with the social network by setting up Twitter accounts, but not going much further. But once its people began to test the medium and find that their tweets were not necessarily disappearing into the online equivalent of a black hole - and were starting to generate results - the activity suddenly made sense.

What it takes is a…well…twattergy. For existing Twitter users, this isn’t a bad place to start.

If you are just thinking about dipping a virtual toe in the social media pond, then either read as much as you can about it or get some good advice from someone who’s doing it before taking the plunge. The opportunities are great, but so are the risks.

Minutes ago, Forrester analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, (pictured) concluded his presentation at the Dutch social media conference, CSN 09, leaving no-one in doubt about the future of social media.

And though I wasn’t lucky enough to be in Amsterdam myself,  through the magic of Twitter and the tweeting fingers of various attendees, we can all share (in an oh-so-social media fashion) some of the insights that Jeremiah gained from the recent research project, The Future of the Social Web.

Points picked up at the conference included:

- Social is inevitable: everything will be social

- The needs of the (online) community must come first - brand second

- Put the most popular part of your corporate website on social networks where they can become social

- Products and services will be rated by online communities, like it or not

- Make your online content social and aim to share it on the right platforms (yes - that means “fishing where the fish are”)

- When selling social media to your company, focus on the C-word: customers

- Communities take the driving seat when it comes to buying

- (Imposing) registration online is for one thing only - to allow marketeers to bug you and bug you again 

(Thanks to Tweeps for the Tweets: @marcvanderput, @AmazingPR, @RobertLommers, @csnconference, @evr)

Today sees the official launch of Freedoma.com , a Manchester-based customer review site which seems to take its ethics from another era.

Promising to “spread the love”, Freedoma can’t help but make you want to reach for a kaftan and head for San Francisco with flowers in your hair. Well, you might want to ask your parents first if there was anything wrong with free love.

PR Media Blog agreed to share the love with Freedoma’s brain (love) child and MD, Caleb Storkey, and blow away the joss stick smoke to reveal all about this latest social media business: 

PRMB: Why is Freedoma needed in Manchester at this point? 

Freedoma: Freedoma promotes and supports local businesses, helping customers share their thoughts on the organisations they love and those to steer clear of. For Manchester, it’s all about getting alongside the local, independent stores. For businesses, it’s all about them being given the opportunity to grow and develop their reputation online, so that customers choose them not based on how big their marketing wallet is, but on how good they are.
 
PRMB: How does it differ in what it does?

F: Unlike yell.com which only offers an address listing and very little additional information, Freedoma collects and collates feedback from customers of each business to get the lowdown on what a business is really like. It also make it possible for local businesses to offer special offers directly to customers. There is the ability for users to see which businesses their friends use and rate. There is a whole bunch of stuff in development, that is already knocking our socks off, and will be unveiled in the forthcoming weeks and months.  

PRMB: How will people find you online?

F: We’ve a lot of quirky activity going on offline that will bolster up the finding online. Shortly people will find us when searching for special offers, plumbers in Manchester, cafes in Leeds, etc, through our SEO and SMO campaigns. But, the power and incentive of word of mouth will be a key to our success. 

PRMB: How will the site make money?

F: The simple way that the site will initially make money is through businesses taking out enhanced listing, which entitles them to a bunch of additional features. We’re rollling out intially with special offers during the launching season. There are a number of additional monetisation routes, but these are currently under wraps until these features are launched. 

PRMB: Will you be aligning it with other social media, e.g., Twitter feed?

F: Yes- integration with other social media is an important part of phase 2.

PRMB: How will you police potentially libellous material?

F: People will have the capacity to flag reviews that are libellous, which will then be assessed. 

PRMB: Freedoma has a very different feel about it. Has it been inspired by another company with similar values or from your own personal outlook on life?

F:  I’ll take that as a compliment (I think ;). It’s come from my personal outlook on life. I really believe in desiring the best for people, and that if businesses adopted more of a position of serving society, society would be all the better for it. The financial bottom line is one motivator for people, but appreciation, spreading the love and the recognition that their hard work can positively impact people’s life, is a far greater motivator. I guess we’re all learning how this can outplay itself. Little bit hippy and change the world (ish), but I’m convinced somehow life and business can work like that. I think if done well, that’s one of the major potentials of social media. 
 

The social media revolution is afoot - and we could be in the process of ruining it altogether.  

On the first point, thanks to Social Media Playground for bringing PR Media Blog’s attention to the latest research from IBM - “Beyond Advertising: choosing the strategic path for the digital consumer - which puts numbers against the current shift in consumer expectations and marketing responses.

The trends revealed in the study show US consumers wanting to be engaged with online: word of mouth and online marketing is expected to grow to 27% of overall expenditure by 2012 - up from 7% in 2002; 76% of people are watching video (up 27%) while 32% are consuming it on a mobile phone or other portable device. Advertisers are increasing online/interactive marketing spend by 63% and are engaging more in “brandsactional” advertising, by which I assume it means marketing activity that sits comfortably, rather than intrusively, in the social media arena.

So far, so good, right?

Well, on my second point, Spike Jones at Brains on Fire blog is already warning that the lunatics are taking over the asylum, with traditional marketers tumbling headlong into traditional methodologies that don’t belong in social media, namely making relentless noise, pushing out messages and screaming “listen to me!”.

It’s no surprise. Social media forces many marketing communciations people (across the spectrum of those with spiked hair, greying hair and those without hair) into a discomfort zone they’d rather not be. “Where’s the control? Do we really have to talk to the - urgh! - general public?” And this naturally brings a reversion to type; adopting the trusted methods of yore. Don’t get me wrong, many of yesterday’s practices remain relevant today, and may always have a role to play.

But treating social media as another medium to be “targeted” simply misses the point. As Spike Jones concludes, if marketers try to exploit social media to be the “centre of attention”, people will “just change the channel”.

Does Management Today’s editor, Matthew Gwyther, have seriously Luddite tendencies or an incisive point when it comes to Twitter? 

Aside from believing Twitter is a “tedious fad we would do well to pull the plug on”, he was singularly unimpressed with its use by news organisations as way of reporting the G20 shenanigans in the City of London last week. He called it “an unwholesome mess”, yearning for a return to “day-after-the-event” news consumption of a “page of newsprint”. Well, while Management Today lives on in hard copy, the printed news product is under increasing pressure and traditional news sources are looking more and more to the web.

And despite Gwyther’s misgivings, the Guardian’s first real foray into front line reporting via Twitter was felt by Janine Gibson, editor of guardian.co.uk to have been a resounding success, as she recounts in the publication’s latest media podcast. The beauty of using Twitter to report, she mentions, is being able to show the many strands of a story that don’t necessarily evolve in a linear fashion. After all, the G20 protests were no more or less about smashed windows than they were about peaceful demonstration - they were many things at once, and - to steal Gwyther’s phrase - Twitter was able to help convey the messiness of that.

EConsultancy’s Chris Lake, despite being a self-confessed “Internet fiend”, takes a phlegmatic view of Gwyther’s dismissal of Twitter: “Some things just don’t work so well on Twitter, which is obviously limited by 140 characters and is no place to tell a story”. But he draws a useful parallel with the Sky News coverage, which was lo-fi to say the least.

As one of the comments posted on the Management Today blog post points out, Twitter could well be a fad; but the parent that spawned it - social media - seems very much “here to stay”.

SXSW Flash Panel: Corporations & Social Media from Kipp Bodnar on Vimeo.

Once you’ve got over the initial impression that this is a convention of intellectual truckers, the above film is a great insight into how and why US companies are using social media - and particularly blogs - to facilitate a conversation with customers and understand what they really want.

Social media evangelist, Chris Brogan, brought together people from companies including GM, Crocs, Best Buy, Pepsico, AMD and Jet Blue to share their ways of working online.

And as one commentator on Brogan’s blog succinctly puts it, the value companies get from using social media is being able to say to their customers: “This is me. Love me. Hate me. But ultimately, tell me how to be better.”

From 1.10pm today, Amnesty International showed what social media can do to propogate awareness of and support for a critical cause.

Its 1:10 campaign - based on the statistic that one-in-ten UK women are raped or subject to violence each year - asked Twitter users (along with MySpace and Facebook folk) to replace their avatar with the above logo and, at 1.10pm, update their status message to reflect the main one-in-ten campaign message and pass on the web site URL.

It’s a simple idea, but one that is memorable and easy for the social media audience to get behind and share (seeing as that’s what they do best!).

There’s a great line in Al Pacino film, Carlito’s Way, when his eponymous ex-mobster character delivers a stark lesson to corrupt lawyer, David Kleinfeld, played by Sean Penn. After Penn has killed the head of an Italian-American crime family with a tyre iron around the head, Pacino recommends he keep a loaded pistol close at hand because: “You a gangster now, Dave”.

This makes me think of the shift one makes when having the power to press “publish” on your blogging software and bring your carefully crafted thoughts to the world. To paraphrase Pacino, “You a publisher now!”

And in the new dawn of social media, that’s something PR Media Blog is encouraging companies to do, alongside a chorus of others persuading them that the customer (consumer, B2B or public sector) is no longer expecting the internet to consist of well-designed but static websites of one-way communication, but a dynamic stream of compelling content and mutually beneficial conversation. Hence, whatever line of work you’re in, publishing such material online - that demonstrates your expertise and creates a dialogue - should make good business sense.

But while we urge you to press “publish”, we also urge you to beware. One of the critical lessons learned at journalism college is about the laws of libel and slander. They are there to protect those whose reputation has been unfairly sullied by the written word, though they are also used unfairly by powerful, vested interests to scare away journalists willing to probe and uncover wrongdoing.

But publishers are used to this and have lawyers well-versed in libel law on standby. That’s the nature of the game; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But if YOUR business has launched a blog, has a Twitter feed, populates a Facebook page or contributes to online forums, regardless of whether you make concrete mixers, cable ties or cola, that makes you a publisher too.

This week at the High Court, several newspapers and a broadcaster have agreed to pay “substantial damages” to a mother who felt she was wrongly accused of poor parental supervision, after the party her daughter organised through a social network ended up with some minor damage, but not the destruction the newspapers had alleged.

A pertinent element of this publishing saga is the fact that comments added to the newspapers’ online versions of the story (n.b. people should be able to add comments to your blog posts too) turned out to be false, which doesn’t help your case if you’re defending your right to publish and be damned in the High Court.

The likelihood is that most of what you’d ever want to say online will be, in the eyes of the law, “fair comment”. The same goes for those who decide to comment on your blog posts or interact with you elsewhere in the world of social networks and forums. But there’s substance in the old proverb that “the pen is mightier than the sword”; so seek good advice from those accustomed to publishing material online and just pray that David Kleinfeld doesn’t end up your lawyer.

2009 is supposed to be the year more companies finally decide that social media is not just for the kids, but as integral a part of business as having a call centre, buying ad space, sending out news stories, etc.

But how should the bigger companies and brands - often steeped in a particular way of marketing themselves - make best use of the new tools and ways of working?

First things first: while there are new tools (Twitter, Facebook, et al), many of the ways of working are not so new; they are just being delivered in a different way. Listening to customers and meeting their needs - it’s been going on a lot longer than we have.

Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Age blog gives a good appraisal of how companies should be responding to the “diminishing returns from traditional marketing”.

She talks about being able to read “digital body language” - how consumers behave online - and how business needs to recognise that control of the buying decision is now very much in the hands of the buyer.

Maltoni also highlights the importance of the impression companies make online, creating compelling content, measuring interaction and being willing to give to online communities rather than aspiring to control them.

One of the comments on her post, from social media monitoring firm, Radian6’s David Alston, emphasises that the principles that work online have been present for some time offline. He cites the example of an effective clothes shop salesperson who reads the customer well enough to know when to approach and how to be helpful, so heightening the chance of a sale - or, at very least, a conversation.

In its simplest form, effective online interaction with your audience could be deemed as “kindness”. BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week debated a new book on the subject - “On Kindness” by psychoanalyst, Adam Philips - which suggests that, in our society, being kind has become a sort of guilty pleasure rather than an instinctive response. The book says the preferable route is having a “sympathetic identification” with others.

Without wanting to - heaven forbid - come over all touchy feely, isn’t that the essence of social media? And when companies grasp that, is it not a more commercially beneficial approach to the “non-engagement policy” mentioned in some recent PR Media Blog comments?

Whether you are at the point of unravelling the myths of social media  or not, it’s certainly time to participate.