The Engaging Brand

Are social media tools...or a mindset?

When businesses struggle with social media marketing, it is often as simple as how they view social media tools. Successful social marketing is often more about the mindset then the social media tools themselves...

...because the emphasis too often on the media and not the social and the social is an approach to business, an approach to leadership and management, an approach to marketing.

Social is not something that we can be bought through pay per click or marketing campaigns....social is a style, a culture, an ability to find, share and connect with people.

Yes, you can buy media space however you can possibly gain brand awareness, but you cannot buy brand engagement. You can buy likes, followers but you cannot buy brand engagement.

Social media tools are delivery mechanisms for your brand's personality not a replacement!

Therefore is social media seems to be a waste of resource, a waste of time....ask yourself - do we have a social culture mindset or just a set of social media tools being deployed?

Has Social Media Changed the Rules of Business?

There are still leaders who feel that social media is a fad, that social business cannot and will not take hold. There are brands that still use a content marketing strategy to sell, they feel that the web is a 'cheap' sales channel not understanding that basic premise of the Internet was to bring people together...from a consumers point of view it is the convenience of connection, be it to products or people, not the fact it has reduced your overhead.

No one can doubt that the world wide web which developed from the Internet is a part of our culture today. The ubiquity of the web means that the fad claim just is no longer valid.

If you agree with that premise then the problem becomes does the old business rules just have a different sales channel or has social media changed the rules of business.

From my perspective the business rules have stayed the same

Create value - Show the value - Deliver the value - Reap the profit value

So no the business rules have NOT changed.

But the tactics behind show and deliver HAVE changed. Showing and delivering means not taking -  let's face it - the easy way out of

• Telling and then adding a automated phone system to answer the issues.
• Speaking in business jargon but in human, everyday terms; no matter how intellectual the argument.
• Reaching up to your bosses rather than out to the customers. By engaging customers, the value will be created to please the bosses.
• Hiding behind press releases rather handing criticism in a public way. Controlling the message means being part of the social conversation.

If you don't believe that the HOW has changed, just look at political events around the world - people don't believe you just because you are in power, they trust you because you action your values. If you don't then your power will disappear...the network needs networking!

Social Marketing - Create Context As Well As Content

Social media is all about content...true...but content that is relevant to your customer not to the message that you want to distribute....and that relevancy is delivered through context.

One thing I help people with is thinking about the customer as not just a content consumer but as a person...living a real life...thereby putting into context the social content.

I watched an interview with Lauren Bacall who said Humphrey Bogart once said to her

"You walked into that scene like a model on a walkway. Remember when you play a scene, when you walk into a room...something has happened to your character beforehand"

I love this quote as often social marketing can forget about

1. What has caused the consumer to search?
2. Where they are searching from?
3. What is the emotion attached to the search?

Your content needs to reflect the whole customer - NOT just SEO, not just 'blogging techniques of how to create a blog post' or even what is the brand marketing message.

Creating engaging content based on the search is essential however then refining it to reflect the Bogart idea of 'not just acting the scene but acting the full story' then comes into play. By thinking wider than the social content you create engagement so...

'thinking about content is important but putting the content into context is social media marketing at it's best'

Power of the People - Business Strategy Graphic

Great social media marketing fuses the power of business to reach the world and also power of the people to shout about your brand for you....it gives you the power to speak to customers, it gives customer the chance to be heard....it gives social business the chance to show a personality and it gives the customer the chance to shape their brand experience. But what does this all mean for business strategy?

It reminds me of a wonderful passage from Lao Tsu in 700BC.....to help us understand 'Bob' has rewritten it for the networked economy.

What is heroic about your brand?

In a social economy, what people say can spread quickly and therefore what they say becomes vitally important to your brand - you want to create a positive brand meme - in other words something people want to talk about and share with others.

Brands as Jeff Bezos says is not what you say about it, it is "what people say about you when you leave the room"

Forget all the business jargon and just ask yourself

• What is so great about your brand that would make people rave about it?
• What can we do to differentiate our brand, what is our point of difference?
• How can we make it easy for people to share their stories about us?
• How can we show our appreciation to those brand advocates who share those stories?

Your social media marketing is not about pushing your message out, it is about pulling your customers in - to talk about your brand. In order to encourage social media sharing you need to give people something to talk about....giving information about yourself is rarely shareable, giving experiences to others, well that is shareable.

Brand marketing and especially internet marketing can get caught up with so much jargon...it can seem so complicated...it doesn't have to be.....

to attract humans - be human.

to encourage humans to talk about you, speak as a human.

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In a content marketing age, storytelling is important...why?

Because storytelling is the way humans explain the reasons, indeed it is the way historically we have explained history and reasons.

Because storytelling is evokes emotion and it is the emotion that makes us buy. There are few things that we NEED to buy, especially in a consumer society which is influenced by internet marketing. We need to create a reason to buy, or a reason to buy our products or services.

In a sense with social media marketing we are selling content not our brand. Therefore we want people to 'buy in/ to our reasons when we are thinking of marketing in business.

People don't buy features, they buy what the features will do for them. Therefore a story explains that...

People don't buy brands per se, they buy what the brand stands for.....Therefore a story explains that...

People don't buy from the 'company', they buy from people...How many times is it the person that has persuaded you to buy not the technical specifications sheet...Therefore a story explains that...

Content development, indeed content strategy is a package of showing the why, the what, the how of your product and service.

Storytelling is the mechanism by which your writing becomes human.

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Humans outside work are social beings. We join social communities, we love meeting up with friends, we love a good chat about what we think is wrong with the world.....

So why when we are faced with being social at work do we transform from being human to being business-like?

I think it comes down to the word professsionalism....we believe that to be professional you need to sound like a business, when in fact to be professional is to be authentic, to be true and to see the value you can create for others that will flow into your business. To create a social business you need to be ...social!

When you look at the fundamentals of being professional, they are also the fundamentals of being human.

So when we are social networking, when we are social marketing, when we are wanting to create a great customer experience we need to be human. We need to think like a human and act like a human. Now there are many human's on the planet...so which human?

The human that you should be is ....you. After all that is the person you know most, that you can be most like! If you the person is contrary to the brand, then you work for the wrong business....

Actions are a result of how we think so always remember.....in social media to act socially, think socially to transform from a business to a social business that customers want to connect to each day.

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Self belief is such an important attribute to have and this was reaffirmed whilst reading the amazing book Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, such a riveting depiction of life in the concentration camps...not from a political angle but a psychological angle. What is hope? To Frankl it is the basic human need for existence.

Whilst reading I read his quote about life and  about how he sees his role in helping people with their psychological problems

"A painter tries to convey to us a picture of the world as he sees it; an ophthalmologist tries to enable us to see the world as it really is."

It struck me how similar this is to social media marketing and our function in leadership and management, after all social media is about understanding customer behaviour. If we change it to read

"Don't be the social media artist, be the social optician enabling the reader to see"

When we are shop online we are looking for something, something to entertain us, inform us, educate us..... Therefore when it comes to social marketing it is about giving, enabling the reader, guiding the reader not instructing the reader how to think...

Too often brands want to be the social media artist, but in reality that is not what the reader wants....think about a gallery, it is not just the painting...it is about the setting, the customer experience, the back story, the way the paintings tell a story. 

By ceding control to allow the reader to see the solution rather than forcing them to take your solution for them, you are trusting them and they will replay that trust with customer loyalty.

Google is your gallery....how you use that space to entertain, inform or educate the customer is up to you....but don't overstep into selling..let selling be the outcome of a worthwile search rather than the goal.

Is Your Goal Right for Social Media?

The business process and especially the sales process, is about network connections but never make the mistake that the connections are the same for both you and the customer.

Business want.. need to create connections to build customer loyalty.

The consumer chooses (or connects with) a brand that will take them closer to their dream. That dream may be living within their means, it may be to improve their life, to learn, to increase their social or cultural capital.

The problem - especially with social media marketing - is that brands see connection as their goal. They measure their social media (return on investment) efforts through followers or likes etc....but to build brand loyalty through social media it is not the number of connections per se, it is how many people believe that your brand can connect them to their 'dream'....

...because it is through this belief that they will move from a consumer of your social media content...to a buyer of your product or service. 

So how can you connect a customer to their dream...

• By creating social media that reflects their needs not your solutions.
• By creating social media that reflects their worries not your desires.
• By creating social media that reflects empathy to their life not empathy towards your goals

The fact is to connect someone to your brand cannot be a goal in itself...it is the outcome of putting your customer first. 

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Creating Customer Experience Through Social Media Innovation

Innovation in business tends to be seen as relating to the product or service.

Now of course new products are vital but when it comes to social media, the business opportunity is even greater...

In social media marketing it is not just about innovations in technology, it is also about innovation in the website content.

We are human and we can be blown away with all the innovations from a technology perspective....and ignore a vital element of the customer experience.

"Content is what will engage the customer"

Too often in social media we fail to have a content strategy that looks at the social media prism of innovation.

A prism in optics is defined as a "transparent object..triangular withrefracting surfaces at an acute angle with each other and that separates white light into a spectrum of colors."

Social media marketing is about creating that spectrum of colours to your customers and that spectrum is created through creative thinking across the following areas

• Content, content, content - this is the lifeblood...the air that your customers read. So if it isn't valueable to their lives...it won't matter about the delivery mechanism.
• Social Delivery mechanism - how does your market consume content? How can you design a delivery that meets your consumers needs?
• Social Technology - how can technology help you achieve the top two items...this is the enabler of a great customer experience NOT the customer experience in itself.

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